If you sign up for the initiative path and continue on it when others fret about “quality” and “predictability”, you will ultimately succeed. The crowd won’t stop worrying, because worrying is what they enjoy doing. But that’s okay, because you’ll be making a difference and using your newfound leverage to do more and more work that matters.
- Seth Godin, Poke the Box
As Sergey Brin famously said, There’s nothing but search. In a similar vein, Doc Searls once said that the web was filling in two specific and very real needs, the need to know, and the need to buy. On the other hand, dear Mr. Marketer, none of us feels any impelling need to be advertised to. Or targeted. Or sliced and diced. Or to have a relationship we didn’t even know we had with a company we don’t care much about – hey, that’s you, toothpaste sellers of the world! – managed (since when did we become so romantic to manage relationships?) by somebody whose sole aim is to sell more stuff to us. As RageBoy said, these are all just MTDs, or Marketing Transmitted Delusions.
When I’m watchin’ my TV
and a man comes on to tell me
how white my shirts can be…I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones
You know a field is red hot and ripe for innovation when everybody starts suing everybody else over just about anything: Microsoft sues Barnes & Noble over the Android-based Nook; Apple sues Amazon.com – the only company with .com in their name proper not to have folded – over using App Store, which apparently is a trademark, in connection with their mobile software developer program.
I’ve had my fair share of crappy jobs, as we all have. You know what? I never hated a job because of what it took from me – all jobs take a lot from you, especially the best ones.
I hated a job because it never allowed me to give enough to the world.
That’s all I ever wanted: my best self, playing my best game.- Hugh MacLeod, Evil Plans, via Simone
I don’t know where Marissa Mayer read that, apparently
credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced.
But I see a business model here. What if you and your boyfriend or girlfriend could submit your credit card purchases before you get married and get an educated guess from them about the chances – how much more or how much less than the standard 50%? – of your future marriage falling apart?
Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It’s simple, it’s elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it’s got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open — and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful.
— Marissa Mayer, VP Consumer Products, Google, as quoted in Userfocus, via PB
The NY Times, in addition to showing you what your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter, is now offering recommendations via an in-house recommendation engine. The digital newspaper is now made up of what the editors think is important, what your friends share and what you read.
Microsoft used to sell their (crappy) OS to companies. These days, apparently they are paying Nokia a billion dollars to get Win 7 Mobile on Nokia smartphones so they can get distribution, as the saying goes, hopefully attract developers for their App Store and… and then what? Make billions of dollars taking a cut on apps sold for 99 cents? Make billions of dollars selling ads on mobile searches on Bing, which, despite having a 30% market share in the US on pc-based searches, is still losing money to the tune of 2 billion dollars a year? Boy, I’d love to understand their ”strategy”…
So, apparently Firefox is out with a mobile browser. Good; actually, very bad. It’s not listed on Android Market. You need to ask them to send you an SMS and follow a link to download it. If you make your way to their website from your smartphone, they show you the same identical page they show you on the web – so much for being ‘mobile’ – they don’t understand which country you live in, they force you to choose your country from a drop-down list, then to enter your mobile phone number, and finally to guess their captcha. And I never got their SMS message. Well done, Firefox!
Daniel Ellsberg: “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.” I think you should read this.
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