A good read for the day

"I halt abruptly with arrival of the entire global OS2 fan club (both of them) dressed in "The one true OS" t-shirts. Size XXXXL if I'm not mistaken."

BOFH: Critical Mass of Geeks

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"Try not! Do or do not, there is no try."

- Yoda, Star Wars.

Why do we put up with it then?

"Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining."

- Jef Raskin

So when last did you re-boot?

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T.E Lawrence wrote in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

T4T:060405

Good tip from Paul Graham's dad that relates to an old Yorkshire saying:

"Where there's muck, there's brass."

This means that unpleasant work pays. And vice versa too. Work people like doesn't pay well, for reasons of supply and demand.

Also read his essay entitled "Why smart people have dumb ideas". Very astute observations around starting new businesses.

Internet search identity crisis?

Why not try YahooGoogle?

When "good enough" just isn't

Do you Gmail?

If the answer is no, then maybe you should. Google today announced plans to double their current mail storage limit to 2GB on their free Gmail service. Last year's 1GB limit announcement was thought by many to be an April Fool's hoax.

"Our goal is to make sure storage is no longer an issue for web mail users," said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products.

I have been using Gmail for a while now and I must say that I am very impressed with it. Not only is the storage capacity great, but the interface is really a step up from other web-based email services.

OK, so there are some fools...

Encyclopædia Britannica, The Ligatured Encylcopædia, announced its immediate semi-hostile takeover of the Wikimedia Foundation (to be known hencefourth as Wikimædia) and all of its projects, including Wikipedia (now Wikipædia), Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. Founder Jimmy Wales, a suspected cylon, giving a brief statement to the New York Times from his Maui survivalist compound, was reported to be "extremely pleased" with the £133.7 million severance package given to each of the five-and-a-half trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is best known as the "encyclop[a]edia" that any old fool can edit.

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Yes, the Britannica takeover of Wikimedia was an April Fool's Day joke. Apparently they are being kept quite busy today.

Libertado el Brazil?

Free software at last, brothers, free software at last! (Sorry, MLK)

Brazil's President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is turning Brazil into a tropical paradise for the free software movement

They have become the first country "to require any company or research institute that receives government financing to develop software to license it as open-source", meaning that the source code must be free to all.

Now the brazilian government plans to roll out a program called PC Conectado, or Connected PC, aimed at helping millions of low-income Brazilians buy their first computers.

If the president's top technology adviser gets his way, the program will end up offering computers with only free software, including the operating system.

"For this program to be viable, it has to be with free software," said Sérgio Amadeu, president of Brazil's National Institute of Information Technology, the agency that oversees the program.

Read the New York Times story.

Although this is merely a small beginning, I doubt whether Bill Gates will take this lying down.

The real challenge with Longhorn

Microsoft's next version of the operating system, code-named Longhorn, could be a really tough sell for them because users and analysts consider the current version, Windows XP, to be "good enough".

What are the must-have's, the USP's, the killer fetaures that will get users (and more importantly companies) to shell out a lot of money to upgrade?

Read the CNET News.com story here.

Apple VS HP?

Forbes features an interesting match-up between Apple and HP. Ironic considering their shared past (Woz and steve worked there and both companies being garage start-ups) and future (iPods, etc).

Happy 29th birthday, Apple Computer!

Time Magazine's 80th anniversary issue featured a look back over 80 years in a piece titled "80 Days That Changed the World," published on March 31, 2003.

Lev Grossman wrote about one such day that changed the world, the founding of Apple Computer, Inc. on April 1, 1976:

They were two guys named Steve, so Steve Jobs was called Steve and Steve Wozniak went by Woz. At 25, Wozniak was the technical brains. Jobs, 21, was the dreamer with a knack for getting others to dream along with him. They had gone to the same high school, and in the hazy years after graduation (both were college dropouts) a shared interest in electronics brought them together. Jobs didn't yet have his own place, so when their formal partnership began, the decision was made in a bedroom at his parents' ranch house in Los Altos, Calif.

Most computers in 1976 were room-size machines with Defense Department-size price tags, but Wozniak had been tinkering with a new design, and his computer was different. It wasn't much to look at - just a bunch of chips screwed to a piece of plywood - but it was small, cheap and easy to use, and Jobs had noticed the stir it caused when they took it to a local computer club. "He said, 'We'll make it for 20 bucks, sell it for 40 bucks!'" Wozniak remembers. "I kind of didn't think we'd do it." Jobs came up with the name, inspired by an orchard in Oregon where he had worked with some friends: Apple Computer. "When we started the little partnership, it was just like, Oh, this will be fun," Wozniak says. "We won't make any money, but it'll be fun."

They didn't go out and celebrate that day. Woz wouldn't even quit his day job designing chips for calculators at Hewlett-Packard until months later, after Jobs had sold his Volkswagen bus for seed money. Nobody, not even Jobs, saw what was coming next: that Apple would create the look and feel of every desktop in the world and start our love affair with the personal computer.

What is Bigfeeesh about?

Something akin to: "The generalist synthesist weblog - quite often about innovations in innovation and marketing. Juxtaposing the right brain and left. Yin and yang. Analytical and intuitive. Technical and visceral. Future and in-the-now. Intersection of technology, creativity & innovation, leadership, systems, beliefs and worldviews. Eventually, on-the-road coverage from a world journey to the emerging creative class centers of the world."

Evelyn Rodriguez's description of her very own Crossroads Dispatches is one that works for me.

Are you ready for the Global Village?

Well, at least your tailor is.

Read the story of the Hong Kong tailor who sells about 1,000 suits per week to customers in Britain. And yes, he does fly to London for fittings where he sees 70-80 clients per day for three weeks on a trot.

"Wittingly or not, Mr Daswani has made a leap of faith, realising that the broad brush of globalisation can even be applied to a business as intimate and personal as tailoring. "

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We all have dreams. I've had plenty over the years.

Getting my cartoons published one day. Getting my book published one day. Landing an advertising job that didn't totally suck one day. Moving to New York one day. Moving back to New York one day. Getting my name mentioned on X's blog one day...

One day. It's always "One day". My term for it is "Living vicariously through my Future Self".

- Hugh Macleod

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BTW, Hugh's stuff rocks. Go and read the Hugh Train. Yes, he is a tad off the wall, but in my mind he gets it - in a big way. It is ironic that he is an ex-advertising guy.

Got Googlejuice?

Question: "If you are the best [pick profession or expertise] in the world but he/she isn't on Google, does it matter?"

Exactly. No Googlejuice, you simply don't matter etc.

So what is Googlejuice?

One definition: GoogleJuice is the ethereal substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks (in both directions!). Pages with lots of links to them acquire much GoogleJuice; pages which link to highly juicy pages acquire some reflected GoogleJuice. The level of GoogleJuice in a page thus reflects how well connected it is, and thus, in our world where LinksAreContent, how good it is (well, sort of).

Anybody who wants to stay in business should therefore want Googlejuice. It's a no-brainer in the Cluetrain World we live in.

Post script: Googlejuice = a geek's version of french kissing with tequila

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"Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well."

- Vincent van Gogh

iShortiCutti

Marketing guru Seth Godin was recently interviewed by a marketing magazine that targets the direct mail business.

The reporter wanted to know about shortcuts of building a (permission marketing) mailing list.

Seth says: "At least three times she asked me what the shortcuts were. How to do it if you were in a hurry. Most important, how to do it if your message wasn't that interesting."

*sigh*

An ad libbed quote: "It appears that marketing still has plenty of time to do things over and over, but not nearly enough time to do it right."

"If there were shortcuts, people smarter than you and me would have found them already. There aren't. Sorry."

Marketing is hard work. Period.

Shake it up!

Kevin Roberts (Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi) published the following credo recently:

1. Ready. Fire! Aim.
2. If it ain't broke...Break it!
3. Hire crazies.
4. Ask dumb questions.
5. Pursue failure.
6. Lead, follow...or get out of the way!
7. Spread confusion.
8. Ditch your office.
9. Read odd stuff.
10. Avoid moderation!

Also take a look at his website about branding.

I wonder how many companies can afford to be this bold without scaring off the average investor? Or, put differently: how would one convince Warren Buffet that this approach makes sense?

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“In classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke,’ but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, ‘Let us march.’”
— Adlai Stevenson

Are there enough leaders out there that will get you to march?

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“The ‘surplus society’ has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality.”

- Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle, Funky Business

So, start thinking different or you won't be. A.k.a. Cogito multimodis ergo sum. (rough translation: I think different therefore I am)

Larry 3, Hasso 0

Sorry, Hasso, but Larry beat you to Retek as well. The list so far: Yachting, Peoplesoft and Retek. Who or what's next?

(PS: OK, I know I am guilty of VS too now)

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"Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall."

- Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect (1867–1959)

Vendor sports follow-up

With the topic still fresh, it is true that some companies fuel Vendor Sports activities through their own actions.

For example, click here for advice on how to buy a flash music player from someone that doesn't even make one.

*sigh*

Remember, William, the customer _does _not _care...

Training for the Olympics yet?

Do you play or follow "Vendor Sports"?

It is a term coined by Doc Searls, one of the Cluetrain authors.

It probably depends on how you see markets. Doc's opinion:

"There are basically two ways you can see a market. One is as a place where people gather to do business and make culture. That's what markets have been since the dawn of trade. The other is as an battlefield, arena, playing field, ring, racetrack, or some other war or sports habitat where combatants win, lose or draw."

According to him, Vendor Sports exists largely as a revenue stream for the tech press.

Examples:
- Novell VS Microsoft (NT)
- Microsoft VS Open Source
- Sun VS Linux
- Oracle VS MS SQL (ok, maybe Larry himself loves a fight)
- SAP VS The Rest (since Hasso moons competitors, we know he loves a fight)
- Apple VS Microsoft VS Apple
- Java VS .Net

And the list continues...

An interesting perspective though: "Attempting to annihilate your competition is not a good business plan, because Customers DON’T CARE."

But, although it probably is true that Customers don’t really care much for Vendor Sports commentary, they waste more time and resources following it than they would like to admit.

Doc's logic continues: "By fighting something, rather than by accommodating it, or at least adapting to it, you force partners and customers to make a sharp OR choice, rather than an AND choice."

"Meanwhile, most markets, and most customers, work by AND logic, not OR."

"But hey: OR logic does make for better stories. Unfortunately, it's easier to run a business on nonfiction rather than fiction."

Quite often the net effect of these contests is distilled to this: shareholder value destruction.

Google FYI: "the ultimate answer machine"

"Googol" is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

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Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

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Their key philosophy: "Never settle for the best."

Which is why Google co-founder Larry Page says: "The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want."

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Ten Things they believe in and have found to be true:

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.

3. Fast is better than slow.

4. Democracy on the web works.

5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

7. There's always more information out there.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

10. Great just isn't good enough.

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Also take a look at their Software Principles.

RIP HST

"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole multi colored collection of uppers, downers, laughers, screamers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon."

- taken from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I guess you are in bat country now, Dr Gonzo. Go well.

But can we trust you on the suncreen?

It all started innocently enough in a 1997 newspaper column titled "Wear sunscreen." What followed is the stuff legends (and songs) are made of. The column set off a crazy swirl of e-mail, confusion and wisdom dispensing all over the world.

Given the author's viewpoint that inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, Mary Schmich, wrote the world-famous "trust me on the sunscreen" piece as a column for her Chicago Tribune column. Soon the as-yet inexplicable physics of the Internet took over and fiction became fact.

Read the fascinating but real story behind the speech that never was.

Good advice about startup

Paul Graham wrote an interesting essay about starting a succesful business.

According to him you need three things to create a successful startup:

Start with good people,

Make something customers actually want (and I quote: "I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck",

Spend as little money as possible.

Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three has the highest probability of success.

Paul makes everything seem so clear and simple. Don't we sometimes over-complicate entrepreneurship?

Keep playing

Brand is a lovely shorthand for the Client's "IWANNACOMEBACKBECAUSEITRUST'EM." Right?

I (Tom) am a "Steve Jobs Guy." I want to ... PLAY. Screw around. Do the "women's thing" for a couple of years. The "BlogThing." Keep playing, stretching, twitting, foolin' around with people's minds. By "being my cantankerous self" I'm also trying to be original & different & provocative ("worth" my outrageous speaking fees). Michael Lewis got it spot on with the title of his next to last book: "The Next Big Thing." That's what "the hunt" for Value Added is all about. It's pretty primitive; it doesn't need management-speak to confirm it. And if you get a hit (homer = iPod), then you get to keep playin' a while longer.

That's all I ask: GIVE ME ONE MORE AT BAT!!!

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Taken from the comments after the "What is brand equity?" post on Tom's home page.

Light!

"Goethe's final words: "More light." Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that's been our unifying cry, "More light." Sunlight. Torchlight. Candlelight. Neon, incandescent lights that banish the darkness from our caves to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier's field. Little tiny flashlights for those books we read under the covers when we're supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and footcandles. Light is metaphor. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on, the night is dark and I am far from home, lead thou me on. Arise, shine, for thy light has come. Light is knowledge, light is life, light is light."

More wisdom by Chris from NX.

Tom's at it again

Part 1 of Tom Peters', the "professional loudmouth" (his own words, BTW) new selection of tips, "100 Ways to Help You Succeed/Make Money", is now available for download in PDF.

Click here for the Manifesto on ChangeThis!

T4T: Hamba kahle

Chris muses and reads from "The Tempest", Act IV: "In dreams begin responsibilities, so wrote the poet. So it is perhaps. Could it be we take our dreams too lightly, those images from places unknown? Could they in fact be angels in flight, our souls aloft? You know, recent experiences have made yours truly take another pass through the metaphysical thickets. As unlikely as it may sound in this rational age, I emerged on the side of those that cannot help but put their faith in that which cannot be easily explained. Be open to your dreams, people. Embrace that distant shore. Because our mortal journey is over all too soon. "Those cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples. The great globe itself. Yea all which you inherit shall dissolve and like this insubstantial pageant faded. Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with asleep."

By Chris-in-the-Morning from Northern Exposure

PS: Apologies, folks, but NX will be a recurring theme.

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Will:"Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll give it a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Send in the marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number was called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some guy from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And naturally they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what do I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. Why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president. "

From Good Will Hunting.

PS: The irony in the last two sentences is frightening. Maybe Dubya got inspired by the movie...?

On Wikipedia today: the Flag of South Africa

The South African flag is the only six-coloured national flag in the world. Also, it's apparently the third most recognised national flag in the world. Read the story about our flag as featured on today's Main Page of Wikipedia. Click here

Supply Chain Mastery Matters!

Given my activities over the past few years, this story caught my eye:

"Every day, HP delivers 1.3 million inkjet cartridges, 110,000 printers, 75,000 personal computer systems and 3,500 servers. Many of these products are produced by contract manufacturers or original design manufacturers. The company spends about $50bn, or about 64 percent of its revenue, on supply-chain activities. At this spending and complexity, supply-chain mastery is an imperative discipline to control costs and foster collaborative relationships with suppliers."

Source: Managing Automation

Imagine what happens if they really get these numbers wrong? (And remember, they do!)

13 Things that don't make sense

If any of the following things don't make sense to you either, don't worry, New Scientist agrees with you:

1. The placebo effect
2. The horizon problem
3. Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
4. Belfast homeopathy results
5. Dark matter
6. Viking's methane
7. Tetraneutrons
8. The Pioneer anomaly
9. Dark energy
10. The Kuiper cliff
11. The Wow signal
12. Not-so-constant constants
13. Cold fusion

Interesting article available here.

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"Forty two."

- The answer to the Great Question of Life, The Universe and Everything, Deep-Thought.

Thank you, Douglas Adams. It's been bugging all of us.

Shogun, Part 2

Whether the appointment of a foreign boss at Sony may be a signal of real change remains to be seen. Time Magazine has an interesting article on the recent appointment of Howard Stringer.