Showing posts tagged business
Should any future students happen across this. This is my advice as well, students I knew who did four year [sandwich] courses all got fulltime work with their placement employers after graduating.
Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.
So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it.
Fantastic post from Jason Fried over at 37signals. I’ve always believed that the number one trait a designer should have is thoughtfulness. Don’t have a knee jerk reaction to things. Be considered, hear all sides, take a minute (or five) to formulate an opinion.
This always used to bug me in meetings, I sit back, take everything in mull it over and process it from a few angles, and it takes time. Some people don’t give you that time.
Great example of a niche business serving a niche problem. Video explains the service.
Good article that stresses the importance of putting yourself in the customers shoes, with their motivations. Not just for CEOs, but for anyone along the customer journey.
Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business. Eventually these companies realize their error of not focusing enough on the new thing, and then the company fights desperately and hopelessly to recover. Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.
Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO [via TechCrunch]
This. From my experience, this is so true.
A good one from the comments:
Thats the kind of backward thinking that is causing us to lag behind other countries. Consider this - customer buys burger from shop and goes home vs customer buys burger, gives email address for online access (shop can resell this), checks into location on social network (advertising for store) and hangs around town longer. Which generates more revenue overall? [derby_k]
I dont quite agree with the selling the mail address, but this is why some music labels give away singles tracks for your email addresses, the addresses are more valuable to them, as is the repeat trade.
I dont believe we are entitled to free wi-fi, like everything free someone has to pay, but they make it so difficult to the point where I think most people, like me, just give up.
![Paris’s Post-It Wars
French office workers are locked in an one-upmanship arms-race of their post-it prowess. Jump straight to the gallery [Guardian]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqsedtNUEp1qzqp7lo1_500.jpg)
French office workers are locked in an one-upmanship arms-race of their post-it prowess. Jump straight to the gallery [Guardian]
In some ways I get the announcement HP made this week, if your phone hardware sucks [which it does] give up. It still however, left me with a feeling of disbelief.
All you had to do was make one good phone. A solid phone. The OS was golden, just take the torch from Palm and just package it in something good.
However HP followed Palms lead of launching subpar hardware, the day before Apple announced something which moved the goalposts yet again.
In the same vein, don’t announce products months before you are due to release. If you do, dont then miss that deadline. When my Twitter stream went off this week that the Pre3 was onsale - I thought it had been out for months, I couldn’t believe it. You have to follow Apples lead, announce then launch shortly after.
And what the hell was the Veer? Who was that really for.
Ok, HP may not have sourced the Pre/Pixi keyboard but they didn’t have to carry it on. I expressed my displeasure for the keyboard previously. But despite all the tweaks they made to the Pre3, sleeker design, bringing it up to average build quality, they KEPT THE SAME DAMN KEYBOARD - salvaged from an 80s carphone bin of leftovers I suspect.
You even had the drop on Microsoft, who for a long time were flapping around, even they have managed to haul together a competitive OS and claw in some nice hardware design in the Nokia deal. You could have been sitting pretty at #3 in the OS stakes.
I quite fancied getting a WebOS device but I couldn’t get past that damn keyboard, yesterdays specs and the horrible build quality. As said in the article and in analysis all around the web, what is going to happen to WebOS? It’s parent company cant make it work who is going to take it on. Its going to rattle around with Symbian.
The whole thing smacks of corporate mismanagement and a “that’ll do mentality”. They bought something without fully knowing what to do with it. A $1.2B dabble in the mobile space, but hey you’ve got some patents so that’s, uh, you know, something.
