When was the last time you paid to read a piece of content on the Web? Most likely, it’s been a while. The users of the Web have become used to the idea that Web content is (more or less) free. And outside of sites that put paywalls up, that indeed appears to be the case. But is the Web really free? I’ve had lots of conversations lately about personal privacy, cookies, tracking, and “getting scroogled“. Some with technical colleagues, some with…
I’m pretty lucky. For now, this is the view from my office window. You see all those boats? I get to look out at the water, and those boats, all the time (sun, rain, or snow). But those boats… honestly, I see most of those boats probably hundreds of days per year more than their owners do. I’d bet there’s a large number of them that haven’t moved in years. The old adage goes “The two happiest days in a…
“One of the most important ways to sell a car in China is word of mouth. People are listening to their friends, customers want to know what are the experiences of others with a product. So they are listening carefully. If you do not deliver the highest quality all of the time, your customer satisfaction goes down. Dissatisfied customers always talk about that they are not satisfied. So immediately if you don’t deliver, it would affect sales, [and] sales would be going down.” – Karsten Engel, CEO…
The younger you are, the more you wish you were older, so you could do the things you’re not old enough to do yet. The older you get, the more you wish you were younger, so you could do the things you’re too old to do now.
“The Sunscreen song”, which is actually named “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen)”, by Baz Luhrmann, has been a (potentially odd) source of wisdom for me since it came out in 1998, just a few years after I graduated from college. I listen to the song periodically, and try to share it with my kids who, at 9 and 13, don’t yet “get” it. The words of the song aren’t those of the artist, and they aren’t Kurt Vonnegut’s either, regardless of what urban…
About every two months, a colleague and I travel to various cities in the US (and sometimes abroad) to teach Microsoft customers how to license their software effectively over a rather intense two-day course. Almost none of these attendees want to game the system. Instead, most come (often repeatedly, sometimes with more people each time) to simply understand the ever-changing rules, how to apply them correctly, and how to (as I often hear it said) “do the right thing”. Doing…
“…there is still something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem so inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change us and deepen us.” Excerpt From: Lamott, Anne. “Bird by Bird.”
“The reason why businesses love measures is because they mistakenly believe that measures are real, hard data.” Karen Phelan, author of “I’m Sorry I Broke Your Company.”
A year or so ago, a good friend from Microsoft told me he was leaving the company, and was pondering a few ideas about what do next. His ideas had one common trait, that he wanted to improve how people got things done, a desire I’ve highlighted in some blog posts before. Working with a partner, he brainstormed a few ideas, and they focused in on the following use case: When I post a job to a job board, my…
Imagine I handed you a Twinkie (or your favorite shelf-stable food item), and asked you to hold on to it for almost 13 years, and then eat it. Aw, c’mon. Why the revulsion? It’s been hard for me to watch the excited countdown to the demise of Windows XP. Though I did help ship Windows Server 2003 as well, no one product (or service) that I’ve ever worked on became so popular, for so long – by any stretch of…