January 2010 Archives

Gladwell's recent study on the highly successful can be summarized like this: be ultra-fearful of loss, to the point that only a few of the most sure-shot, huge-upside opportunities get your total focus. Today, I read this interview with Charles Faulkner in The New Market Wizards that echoes the same idea:

The benefits of Toward motivation seem pretty obvious, but how would an Away From motivation be beneficial?

Your question reflects a common perception. The benefits of Toward motivation are more obvious. People who move toward goals are greatly valued in our society. You can see it in the language of the Help Wanted ads, which liberally use terms such as "self-motivated" and "go-getter." However the Away From direction of motivation has gotten a bad rap. Another way of thinking about this motivation is that it is away from problems. Many people who use Away From motivation are problem solvers. You can hear it in their language. They'll say, "Excuse me, but we have a problem here." They see a problem and have to solve it. Sometimes they get so involved in the problem that they may forget where they are going, but they will solve the problem. The Toward motivated people are so motivated toward their goals that they might not even consider what problems they might run into or what difficulties to prepare for along the way. Therefore, both types of motivation are useful.

Are you implying that people with Away From motivation are likely to be as successful as those with Toward motivation?

That's right. The Toward motivation may be enshrined in success magazines, but the less appreciated Away From motivation individuals can also be very successful. A perfect example is Martin Zwieg, the famous stock forecaster. He manages over a billion dollars in assets. His stock letter and books are among the most respected in the industry. When Zwieg talks about strategy, he says, "DON'T fight interest rate trends. DON'T fight market momentum." He uses Away From motivation to minimize loss. Many outstanding traders reveal an Away From motivation when they talk about "protecting themselves" or "playing a great defense." They're only willing to take so much pain in the market before they get out. As Paul Tudor Jones said in your interview, "I have a short-term horizon for pain."

Makes me think Gladwell is really onto something.

I like this sentence (bolded) in The New Market Wizards:

He gave me the name of his broker, and I opened up an account. Then the greatest tragedy happened: My first trade was an absolute winner. My second trade was also a winner. My third trade was breakeven. My fourth trade was another winner. On my fifth trade, I gave it all back. Then on my sixth trade, I lost more money than I had made in all my previous winning trades put together.

I like that turn-of-phrase. It tells how psychologically deceiving the stock market can be. My fledgling understanding of trading is that having a high level of introspection and understanding of how your mind works (and doesn't work) is a force multiplier for your performance.

I'm such an evangelist for innovation, but is there a way to test the impact of innovation? Theoretically, innovative companies should perform better, right? What if I took the Fast 50, which are Fast Company's annual lists of the 50 Most Innovative Companies, and checked their stock's performance?

The theory is that innovative companies should release interesting products and services within a year, and that should boost stock price. Here are the results:

These charts imply that if innovation leads to stock growth, it certainly doesn't show it convincingly.

Clearly this is just a rough historical analysis. Ideally, I would average these performances in proportion to the market caps of each company (or should they be inversely proportional to represent innovative upstarts?). And we'd want to see this over fifteen years. And maybe it just says that innovation didn't matter as much during the downturn. Because I'm sure during the boomtimes, people couldn't throw enough money at innovative companies. And who knows how good Fast is at identifying "innovativeness."

But look again. Run your eyes over the individual companies. It's like nearly half did worse than the S&P 500. You'd expect, that if innovation is the godsend we claim it is, that maybe two-thirds or three-quarters of these companies would outperform the S&P.

Notes:
I started with 2007's list because the previous lists aren't sophisticated enough. It wasn't until 2007 that it looks like Fast started evaluating the innovativeness of whole companies. I chose US stock symbols because realistically, I'm only going to invest in those. Also, not every item listed had a stock symbol. For example, "Team Obama" is not listed on any stock exchange last time I checked.

Someone posted on Reddit, "Verizon stealthily installed a BING search app on my Blackberry last night which caused my phone to crash while I was sleeping thus my alarm didn't go off. It's 1:10PM. Good morning, Reddit. F--- you Microsoft/Verizon."

Companies have been getting cavalier with software update policies. Let's say on the transparent-end of the spectrum, the user has to, on his or her own accord, press a menu item to check if there are software updates. On the opaque-end of the spectrum, you have an automatic update that reboots your machine with you none-the-wiser. Probably the furthest to the right that I'm comfortable with is the Firefox policy, of downloading the update and then automatically installing when the app isn't running. When you run Firefox again, it gives you a notice telling you what happened. It's all about striking the right balance between convenience and transparency.

Do not reboot my device for me. That would be like the superintendant unlocking my room to swap out my AT&T Phone Book with a Verizon one just because he's getting a kickback.

This is evil customer service and evil user experience design. I pray for the day when companies run by stooges like this no longer exist.

Note: I don't want to imply that Google isn't evil by this category definition of evil. But rather that all software companies can and should aspire to have more kinder user experiences and software policies

It's often been suggested that the way forward for the iPhone will be to focus on catering to developers. This often comes up because the primary reason the Macintosh did not dominate like Windows did, is because they closed the platform. Many writers are drawing the same parallel with the closed iPhone and the open Android.

But, despite the brilliance of focusing on developers, why has Microsoft been so late to the Internet party. And why are they so far behind in mobile?

I blame corporate culture. What happened is that Google stole all the talented tech trailblazers by treating their developers like kings.

(credit Roger von Oech for starting this thread)

Is there a way that if I read a facebook message in my Gmail, and I hit "Archive," it can automatically "Mark as read" in Facebook? I have the same problem with Google Voice, as I listen/read all my voicemail in Gmail, and after a week, a stack of messages remain unread in the Google Voice app on my phone and on the web.

If you're thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple's take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you're thinking too small -- the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple's reconception of personal computing.

When John Gruber wrote this in The Tablet, it got my wheels turning. I started imagining use-cases. Every couple days or so, some inconvenience would strike me and I'd think, "Wish I had a Tablet." Here they are:

1. The New Yorker is my favorite magazine that I read on a regular basis. The problem is that for some reason, here in Austin, the print magazine arrives on a Wednesday or Thursday, while as some of the content is released online the previous Sunday night, and bookstores get the magazine Monday morning. One option is to read the digital edition that Condé Nast publishes, but the reader is designed almost like you're reading Google Maps, zooming and panning and squinting. The only way to get any use out of it is to print the articles. The other alternative is to read it on the Kindle. The Kindle, however, also has a nasty unified format, and the Kindle edition does not have every article! If I had a Tablet, the magazine would arrive Sunday night in an easy-to-use reader that Apple is inevitably coming up with. Plus, since the Tablet is going to be a flagship device that's supposed to revolutionize the print industry, I expect that Condé Nast wouldn't just provide a fraction of their content, but instead provide the premiere and complete New Yorker experience.

2. I remembered that I had to make a lunchtime dash to the Post Office to pick up a stack of held mail. On the way out of my house, I recalled that waiting at the Post Office is usually a harrowing experience, and that I should bring something to read. On my table was a 400 page hardcover of Googled by Ken Auletta. I wasn't particularly interested in reading it that morning, plus it was kind of bulky. In the scramble, I picked it up anyway. At the Post Office, reading it required two hands, partly because of its weight, and partly because I needed to hold the pages down. Doing this while shuffling forward a couple feet every five minutes wasn't really much better than just waiting patiently. If I had a Tablet, firstly, I wouldn't have had to deliberate as to what reading material to bring. I'd just yank my Tablet, trust in knowing that I'd have everything I wanted to read with me. At the Post Office, I could probably read it with one hand. When I collected my held mail, I could've bundled the Tablet with it, without having to clinch the hardcover book under my arm while juggling my keys and envelopes. Plus, the bigger picture is that I wouldn't have had to waste any trees or as much money buying the eBook version of Googled.

3. Some form of reading material is with me at all times when I'm on the go. When I dash out the door, I usually yank the nearest magazine, and once I get in my car, I drop it on the passenger seat. If I pick up a passenger, then I have to slide the magazine into the side pocket, which if inserted unfolded, flops over. If I fold it up, then it creases the pages. So usually I slip it between my seat and the handbrake, where it inevitably gets stuck, lost, or torn apart. Hardcover books also pose similar problems. Most are too bulky to fit in the side pockets or by the handbrake, so usually I have to move my arms in an awkward way to deposit and retrieve the book from the floor of the backseat. If I had a Tablet, I could slide it securely into the side pocket and also by the handbrake. And this placement wouldn't have to change for each medium. Whether it's newspaper, magazine, hardcover, or softcover, I wouldn't have to stretch, fold, or fuss at all. Most likely, my passenger would pick up the Tablet herself and look up directions for me or read something that interests her.

4. I commute once every quarter from Austin to San Diego to visit family, and it's about a 3-hour flight. Normally, I carry on my laptop, partly for security reasons, but also in case I get bored and want to do some writing. However, the battery on my Macbook Pro, which is a year-and-a-half old, has depleted to the point where at full charge, it only shows one-and-a-half hours of time left. Also, that number is generally deceiving, partly because the last ten-to-fifteen minutes you don't have, as you and your Macbook start to panic about low battery life, and partly, because the number is generally a lie. With one hour of solid use, I have to ration my distractions. I usually read magazines until I get bored and nod off, leaving me with just the right amount of time to use my entire battery for the remainder of the flight. If I had a Tablet, the battery life would definitely better than my Macbook. I'd hope that it'd be much better than 3 hours. Also, it'd be much easier to handle on an airplane. While you wouldn't even need the tray table, if you had to use it, you wouldn't be worrying about the screen bumping a reclined seat. If you wanted to put away the Tablet, you could just slide it into the seat-pocket. No more messing with leaning and reaching below for your laptop bag, then unzipping the bag and stowing it away.

5. If you're going to use your laptop for any long period of time, you're going to want a table. Tapping away on your lap can eventually be an ergonomic pain. And so I was debating whether or not to bring my laptop to my friend's apartment to do some light co-working, like checking emails or looking up reports. But then I remembered that his apartment's really messy, and there's not really any solid table space. Plus, as minor as the task may be, the thought of unplugging my laptop, bringing my power charger, and lugging it in my bag, was kind of a hassle, and I thought to myself, "eh, I'll just play Xbox on his couch, maybe use my phone to do some emails." If I had a Tablet, I wouldn't have to make that compromise. I could just whisk it off my desk, run down the stairs, hop in my car, and be comfortably computing at his place, without having to fuss with cords, table space, or the discomfort of typing on a laptop while you're sinking into a sofa.

6. I saw a small ad in The New Yorker for a water-proof sleeve for the Kindle. This got me thinking: If I had a Tablet, and this water-proof sleeve came out for it (since every accessory manufacturer now has the Tablet in their sights), I could not only read in the shower, but I could blog there too. Warm showers stimulate my thinking, and I always get ideas for blog posts or little business opportunities, but by the time I get out, cooled off, and dressed up for work, the flame has died down, and there's a 50-50 chance I'll jot the idea down to maybe forget later. If I had a Tablet in the shower, I could already be doing light research on my ideas, or maybe even begin typing up a draft.

7. I was interviewing graphic designers, and most of them have digital portfolios. So, usually before the interview, I load their websites on my laptop. However, since Mutual Mobile is just a start-up, I usually don't have the most ideal interview space arranged. Sometimes I have a table, but it's a square one, and the candidate is sitting 90 degrees away from me. When I want to ask them questions about their portfolio, I have to rotate my laptop, which if the table is glass, makes this squeaky sound. I have to rotate it just the right amount so that we can both see it while pointing at it, and usually I have to move my chair around too. Sometimes I don't even have a table for the interview, and so I have to rotate the laptop 180 degrees and peer over while I point and ask questions about their work. If I had a Tablet, I could, with the lightest of gestures, rotate their portfolio so that I'm looking at it upside down and they're looking at it right-side up.

8. I was baking a pizza, and I hadn't used my oven in a while, so I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to burn anything and set off any alarms. I decided it was important to stay in the kitchen, but I also had a bunch of emails on my mind that I wanted to respond to. I could've brought my laptop into the kitchen, but its generally my policy to keep the laptop away from liquids and food. Plus, I'd have to make room for it, and then the whole thing starts to feel like a process. So instead I just pulled a newspaper into the kitchen that I wasn't really that interested in reading. If I had a Tablet, I wouldn't think twice about computing in the kitchen.

9. When I wake up, I stumble to my computer area, awaken either my desktop or laptop, lean in to either move the mouse or use the trackpad, and then crane my neck to face my upright monitor, just to check the weather. This routine happens three our four times a day for a lot of little tasks, like reading a short email standing up or changing mp3 playlists. Either way I'm bending my back, craning my neck, and stretching my arm in order to avoid having to roll out my ergonomic chair and situation myself in front of the screen just to take care of a task that would have taken five seconds standing up. If I had a Tablet, I'd just have to look down, tap tap tap, and be done with it.

It's a great testament to Apple's marketing machine that they can elicit such a grand sense of possibility for a device that hasn't even been officially announced yet.

I had a Compaq Portege Tablet PC in 2003. I've played with the Kindle. And I've paid attention to the announcements for Tablet computers at CES. And while there are a lot of devices that can take care of some of these use-cases, Apple's Tablet would probably take care of all of these, and would do so at a level of polish that would make you want to use it every day.

Until a few years ago, my philosophy was to do the hardest tasks first. My thinking was that by knocking those out of the way, you eliminate whatever psychological resistance you have to even embarking on your to-do list.

But a few years ago, when I was working at the video game company Aspyr, our producer always emphasized the opposite route: do the easiest ones first. So any time our team had large bug queues—sometimes 50 or more per developer—we'd always start with the bugs that would take less than half-an-hour to do.

This has a couple benefits. For one, if you do the easy ones first, your to-do list will deflate rapidly to about 20% of its initial size. This therefore eliminates the resistance that comes from feeling overwhelmed.

An added benefit, though, is that the harder tasks may become easier with time. Firstly, because some of the easy things may lead to ways of making the harder task easier. But also because the longer you wait, the more chances you have for ideas to crop up that will make your life easier.

I've often found that strategic procrastination can turn a task that initially seemed like it would take 5 hours into something that takes 15 minutes. For example, there's been a couple times where I procrastinated doing paperwork, and eventually a simple form online or a quicker alternative just pops up out of nowhere.

To-do lists are on my mind, partly because I'm doing errands today, but also because there's an interesting new service, with a cheeky video tutorial, called Teux Deux. (via SarahQB)

Gladwell in the New Yorker:

This is consistent with the one undisputed finding in all the research on entrepreneurship: people who work for themselves are far happier than the rest of us. Shane says that the average person would have to earn two and a half times as much to be as happy working for someone else as he would be working for himself.

A study designed to discover what successful entrepreneurs have in common produced this conclusion:

There is almost always, they conclude, a moment of great capital accumulation—a particular transaction that catapults him [or her] into prominence. The entrepreneur has access to that deal by virtue of occupying a "structural hole," a niche that gives him a unique perspective on a particular market. Villette and Vuillermot go on, "The businessman looks for partners to a transaction who do not have the same definition as he of the value of the goods exchanged, that is, who undervalue what they sell to him or overvalue what they buy from him in comparison to his own evaluation." He moves decisively. He repeats the good deal over and over again, until the opportunity closes, and—most crucially—his focus throughout that sequence is on hedging his bets and minimizing his chances of failure.

(from Malcom Gladwell, on how entrepreneurs really succeed)

In other words, see value where others do not. Be a futurist. Know where the puck is going to be before everybody else does. Be the crazy one, the outlier, the only person who finds something interesting.

Google recently scored an extra point in the "Not Evil" column when they announced they're essentially leaving China.

But what else can Google do? Let's take a page from one of Roger von Oech's Creative Whack cards, and play the "What If" game. What if Google had no ads? And not just the ads on the right-hand side of search results. What if they also had no AdSense ads that appear on the publishers that Google inevitably sends you to as well?

Bob Pritchett wrote:

There's an opportunity here to create a web search engine that punishes results littered with ads. Google can't do it - they live off those ads. A site that took ads but didn't have an incentive to send you to other sites full of them could offer a superior experience. (via)

If you turn the clock back to 1998, this is precisely what Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to do. They outlined this exact issue in a paper they presented as part of their Ph.D. requirements:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

(via Googled by Ken Auletta)

There was a point, maybe five years ago, when it seemed like everybody had positive things to say about Google's search engine. Now when they refer to it, it's often to imply that it's a necessary evil. And when you have such massive and widespread frustration, that points to an equally massive opportunity for a new upstart.

But which startup will fill the vacuum? Bill Gates famously once said that the competitors he worried about the most were a couple kids in a garage. But who would be the equivalent "kids in a garage" to Google?

When I think of the word "fad," I think of a timescale around six to nine months, i.e. the typical school year. The first fads that I encountered were Pogs and Magic Cards in Middle School, lasting a little less than one school year, usually being banned by month six or seven.

So when MySpace had a growth spurt that continued for years, starting in 2003, the constant debate about social networks was around whether MySpace was a fad or not.

Now that MySpace is finally declining in traffic, there was clearly something faddish about it:

But the reason MySpace so frequently dodged the "fad" label was because it was more like a fad-wave. A fad-wave is built on the cascading excitement that is renewed every time more of your friends catch onto the fad. So when you initially join MySpace, you have like an initial six-month excitement cycle. But by the time month three rolls around, a group of your friends join, and they start their own six-month cycles, further extending your cycle by an extra month perhaps. Then by month three of their cycles (your month six), a group of their friends join, which extends your friends' cycles a month (and your cycle by maybe another month). Until you find yourself hanging around for a year-and-a-half until everybody you know has finally gotten the MySpace bug out of their system. And then the technology reaches some stable state, half of what it was at its peak.

A fad-wave benefits tremendously when the fad has network effects, i.e. when a large part of the excitement is the growing excitement of group. MySpace was growing, and you were a part of that, and that just fueled it further.

One thing that this whole CES hoopla over Android has done is effectively make the entire SmartPhone space a wash. My friends who are now free agents (i.e. they bought the first iPhone, but their two-year contracts are up), have no idea what phone to buy. When they ask me, I don't have a definitive answer. This is a stark contrast to the past two years when the mantra was always, "Wish I had an iPhone."

My personal interest in SmartPhones is nebulous now. I have a Motorola Droid, and I don't really think twice about it. As that perennial sourpuss John C. Dvorak once said a couple years ago about the iPhone hype: "it's just a phone." The hype is finally dying, and my fad-wave is nearly over, as I have hardly any new friends getting SmartPhones for the first time.

God, that dreaded word "SmartPhone" is back in my lexicon. I worked in mobile in the late 90s, and the SmartPhone was always associated with the unimaginative attempts of telecoms to sell J2ME and whatever crap mobile experience as "the next big thing." I was embarrassed to call myself a "mobile developer" back then, especially after the dot-coms already crashed.

There was a brief period, though, when the iPhone came out, when I was mighty proud to call myself an iPhone developer. Unfortunately, now that I also do Android, I have to resort to "SmartPhone developer" as an alternative to the clunky "iPhone-slash-Android developer."

Which is all to say kudos to Google. They finally burst the iPhone's bubble. Even though the iPhone is still the phone to beat, I'd venture that consumers are equally curious about "dem Google phones" as they are about the iPhone.

This may go against traditional venture capitalist advice of making your business idea comprehensible. If someone pitches an idea to me that is bizarre or puzzling, I'm actually intrigued. Because, at the very least, I already know they have a first-mover advantage in the plane of concepts. They thought of something that other entrepreneurs haven't even developed the conceptual framework to see value in.

Especially if they're really enthusiastic about it and are really bright, your money is going to go a long way if you invest in them.

New York Magazine writer Lindsay Robertson (on her Tumblr no less) describes the "Do's and Don't's of Online Publicity." These parts stood out to me (in bold):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE means FOR IMMEDIATE DELETE to any blogger with any influence. Period.

...

Pick eight blogs

...

She told me her secret: she only publicizes to eight blogs. She picked the eight blogs that covered her client's subject, TV, that she liked the most on a personal level, read them religiously, and only sent them only the content she thought each blog would be into. While the rest of the publicists in her company were sending out mass emails to everyone, hoping to get bites from Perez Hilton, Gawker, HuffPo, or wherever, this publicist focused on a lower traffic tier with the (correct) understanding that these days, content filters up as much as it filters down, and often the smaller sites, with their ability to dig deeper into the internet and be more nimble, act as farm teams for the larger ones. A site can be enormously influential without having crazy eyeballs, because all eyeballs are not equal. MANY times - I would say almost every time, that I posted one of her client's items on my site, they were linked back within hours by the big guys, who probably would have tuned her out otherwise.

(via kottke)

I'm going to venture a little guess. More people use Photoshop for web design or other computer-consumed graphics than for print. And it's probably been this way for, let me guess, 10 years.

In which case, Adobe is long overdue to make the setting for "Units & Rulers" default to "pixels."

I did a Google search for writers reviewing their 2009 predictions and Ed Kholer made some interesting predictions about social networks:

3. FriendFeed will peak (if it hasn't already) as people realize some content is best consumed in silos.



4. Tumblr will double in traffic & users as people catch on to how easy it is to find and share really interesting stuff among friends.

Correct. Underestimated.

Blippy [CrunchBase] is a social network that automatically shares your purchases. It's like Twitter, where your feed looks something like this:

philipkd spent $9.61 at Little Mexico Restaurant
pud spent $398.50 at AT&T Wireless
cte spent $127 at Zappos

When I explain this to people, the first reaction is always, "Why on earth would you share that?" However, to those who are actually on Blippy, the answer is obvious: people want to show off. The friends who I know on it (and myself) are insanely addicted to it.

In addition to the addiction potential, it also has an obvious business model. If people are talking exclusively about purchases, that just gives you an opportunity to insert highly targeted advertising. Not to mention all the analytics possibilities.

In addition to the addiction potential and obvious business model, its more trustworthy than Twitter. Twitter was supposed to be all about getting links from trusted sources, and yet now, nobody is sure what is real and what's not half of the time. Twitter often seems like a repeater cable or a me-too chain. On Blippy, users are putting their money where their mouths are.

Having said that, the real existential question is whether the service is compelling enough for enough people to overcome their privacy qualms. There's two points in favor of Blippy:

1. The future is heading toward more and more letting go. Six months ago, people gave me a skeptical eye when I said I used Mint.com to organize all my financial information. Now everybody is curious about it. Plus, the big picture is that security technology scales. Blippy and Mint.com have better security that your personal accountant. So it could be that the hesitation to Blippy is the same as the hesitation to Facebook and MySpace, where your children are actually safer spending an hour online than at the mall.

2. People take many more risks in real life to display wealth. What is a fancy-looking house with a visible front yard and luxury cars parked outside? It's an invitation. What is strutting down main street with your jewelry and expensive shoes? It's a status update. Blinging is timeless.

So the Blippy idea has a handful of solid starting aspects in its favor. Whether it succeeds or not, as it is with all new social networks, will then be matter of execution and chance.

Cloud Computing has been one of those Holy Grails of computer science. I remember being in High School and watching a talk by Scott McNealey of Sun Microsystems making loud claims about how everybody will just have simple terminals with Internet access and store everything in data centers. And look where that kind of thinking got him.

But there are now signs that finally Cloud Computing is on its way here. You only have to look at changes in your own personal computing to see the proof.

For example, there's more and more applications that are faster for me in the Cloud. The first one that comes to mind is Gmail, which is faster than Outlook or Apple's Mail.app. Another is spreadsheets and text documents. It's faster for me to just hit the "Documents" link on Gmail (which is almost always open), and then hit New -> Spreadsheet (or Document), rather than fire up those Microsoft Office beasts, Word and Excel. Plus, people are already weary enough about loading attachments.

Another example is looking at hard disk usage. In 2006, I tried to invent a law, like a tongue-in-cheek version of Moore's Law:

Dhingra's Law (Fallacy) of Disk Usage
The typical consumer believes that by doubling his hard drive capacity today, he will have more than enough space for tomorrow. 18 months later, he is at maximum capacity.

Google is betting big on Cloud Computing. Chrome OS will simply be a web browser, with no user-accessible hard disk space. Will they reach the Holy Grail this time, or will they suffer the same fate as Sun?

The sell was going really well. I received a little slip of paper in the mail with a dead simple form to order personalized address labels from Artistic direct for only $7.99. I'm thinking, "Great, I can get this done right now, and pay the bill later." By the time got back home and sat on my sofa, I almost forgot and cast the paper aside.

But then I saw a line that said, "save $1 if you order online." "Excellent," I thought, and went ahead and tried to purchase. I was one click away from checking out when I saw this:Shipping:
21 business days (3-5 days processing, plus 10-14 days 3rd Class U.S. Postal Service) - $2.99Are you kidding me? In this day and age, I'm going to wait that long for simple personalized labels? While I was about to just say "screw it" and check out anyway, I was irked enough to Google "address labels." The first result that came up would then proceed to sell me 60 labels for $1 and $1.99 shipping, and it'd get here in 3-5 days.

Here's the lesson: it's still possible to make ridiculous margins on simple products because the average consumer won't comparison shop. As soon as you have them "on the line" so-to-speak, do not give them any excuse to bail out. It's hilarious to see ecommerce statistics showing that something like 85% of people bail out on their orders when they reach the check out page. If you add any extra steps or put anything that breaks the shopper's flow, you are asking them to open a new tab and do a Google search. Keep the shopper in flow and you can sell them anything.

Over the next ten years, watch for the rise of the "corporate culture consultant." This person's job will be to reorganize a company such that its employees are more creative, that problems are reported more quickly, and that multiple departments synergize better.

What you see today is that certain industry leaders have uniquely claimed their spot because of their cultures. When you think of Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, you think of companies whose excellent products are an expression of their excellent places of work.

And I think this is a new idea. I think there was a time, ten years ago perhaps, when idiosyncratic corporate cultures at places like Google were considered quaint. If you approached a CEO of the average, troubled, Fortune 500 company, and said, "in order to succeed, you need flat corporate hierarchies, exceptional pampering of developers, 20%-time, and free 5-star cuisine for grunts and execs alike," they'd all laugh.

But today, I think they're listening.

The big telecoms have spent billions of dollars to try to reach The Promised Land of meaningful mobile experiences. And now we see that its the hippies at Google and Apple who came out of nowhere and stole the show.

It may be the case that unenlightened companies can play catch-up. After all, Microsoft's Bing is often said to be nearly as good as Google. And we see HTC and Motorola catching up quickly to Apple's iPhone. But what if that's not good enough anymore. What if the increasing pace of technological change demands more than just catch-up. You need a company flexible and innovative enough to be there with the best-of-breed product right as consumer demand picks up. And you can't just buy innovation by throwing money at talented people. You have to give them a place where they can thrive, where they don't feel stifled by middle management or overruled by sales or marketing.

This is a hard post to write because I have friends in marketing. Having said that, the big picture is that the majority of people dislike marketing. It's something they put up with. That's partly why I've always felt uneasy doing marketing. It has always been a chore for me, a necessary evil. I was being rewarded for how much I could get in people's faces about my products. Probably the only reason marketing guru Seth Godin is palpable to me, is because he engages in a clever doublethink, wherein making excellent products is marketing.

If the App Store had its golden days, it was between apps 1-10,000. Back then, no marketing was required. Good apps surfaced immediately, and for a while I thought that somehow, Apple broke the formula completely. A solo developer who was skilled enough could get rewarded directly by the market in proportion to how good their App actually was.

Today, as a person who interviews iPhone developers every day, I see many brilliant programmers who tried to hack it in the App Store, but were blocked out because they couldn't hack it in marketing.

This seems somehow unfair or a situation that if improved, would be for the better good. Does the march of progress mean that those golden days could be permanent? That marketing could becomes unecessary?

I used to enjoying reading AdBusters, and one time they put together a portfolio of billboards that were torn down, revealing beautiful blue skies. A few years later:

On January 1, 2007, Sao Paulo's rightwing populist mayor made a striking proclamation: no outdoor advertising anywhere in the city. Suddenly, the city of 11 million people had no visible billboards, illegal street posters, kiosk ads, or neon signs -- not even the Goodyear Blimp could pass muster. " Within months," as On the Media put it, "the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past." The "visual pollution," in the mayor's words, was erased. The imagery, captured in a Flickr pool, is truly amazing.

The Nexus One launch yesterday was really interesting when you compare it to the way Apple markets. So, rewind back, and it was around a month ago that Google simply gave its employees a Nexus One as a Christmas present and then permitted them to tweet about it. Then a few top bloggers were given review copies of it. And then there was a launch yesterday. That's it. No heavy marketing buys. No complex hype machine.

The big "what if" then, is what if this beats the iPhone? What if this strategy prevails over the Apple reality distortion field?

I'm reading Ken Auletta's book Googled, and he describes Google, for better or for worse, as being all about engineering. For example, some top designers have quit Google in frustration because design ideas based on intuition and holistic thinking get overridden by usability and focus tests. It's numbers over moxie. The engineers are running the mad house, and my guess is they override marketing as well. When you think of Google, you probably don't think about them for their stellar marketing.

Or maybe you do, but it's the kind of marketing that Seth Godin promotes, wherein you make your products so extraordinary, that they market themselves.

But taking that a step further, what if that's more than just a strategy, but an actual representation of where industry is going? In an ideal world, with efficient markets, nobody would need to tell you about their products. The good products would already be known. What if ten years from now, Godin's strategy is the only way to market your products, by investing in stellar product development.

If you step back and take the broad view of technology, you'll see that one thing it does well is cut out the middlemen. It nixes all the people in between the product and the customer. That has been Dell's strategy with its trademarked "Be Direct" slogan. And that is what the Internet has been doing all along.

What if the only reason Barnes & Noble didn't make it is because their brand name isn't SEO-friendly. 50% of the time I visit Barnes & Noble's website—which is about once a quarter—I misspell the domain name. Then I Google for it. By the time I get there, I'm frustrated. Already, my user experience is not off to a good start.

Even when I typed up a draft of this post, I misspelled the name. Is there an "s" after the "e"? I always forget!

I want to suggest that this has had somewhere between a 10-35% dampening effect on any Internet success that Barnes & Noble has tried to claim. Multiplied over a decade-plus, and that has lead to an exponential failure.