Outside Look

Dear United, What’s Going On?

In November I switched my primary airline from Northwest to United, in part due to moving away from a Northwest hub, and in part because I was tired of the mediocre service. For the first few weeks I was quite happy. The service was generally good, and despite not having the Gold elite status, I was impressed by the better service from the flight attendants, gate crew and customer service people. Sadly, the honeymoon appears to be over. During the month of January I have had two canceled flig...

Let’s Talk Marketing Strategy

This week I bought a Blue-Ray player. I wanted a new DVD player, and thought it was time to go hi def rather than grab the old technology cheap. So, why did I buy Blue-Ray rather than the equally good HD-DVD format? Two very simple reasons: there 'appeared' to be more Blue-Ray titles available, and I could get 5 free titles out of the store, and 5 more free by mail (which isn't as good as it sounds as the titles are very limited by mail). It was really nice to see just a few days later that W...

Taking an Outside Look

The New York Times has an excellent short article on the barriers to innovative thinking. One of the key points is the fact that we become experts in a field and then have a hard time thinking 'outside the box.' Many managers wish to hire people with significant industry experience, yet think they are bringing in 'new blood' - and it won't work. Bring in new ideas from people who have proven successful in other businesses - B2B marketing managers with consumer packaged goods experience, banki...

Of Banks and Blogs

The other day I went looking at banks to see what they were doing with blogging, and I wanted to share my results here. I looked at the top 20 US banks by deposits, and left out a few with high deposits but low consumer presence. My expectation was that of the top 20 banks, 4 or 5 would have a blog presence, and I expected that they would be focused on things like retirement planning, online security, and new products. It turns out I was completely wrong. List of bank web sites reviewed: ...

iPhone Unknown Error (6)

Phew, what an afternoon. Hopefully someone can find this frustrating experience useful. I picked up my iPhone this afternoon and found it had apparently spontaneously rebooted and was hung on the boot screen with the Apple logo. A few home+sleep/wake reboot cycles with no change left me quite concerned. The best choice seemed to be to force a restore, which was the best advice I could find from the net. As seems to be the case for many (though most often with jailbroken iPhones, which mine...

What Didn’t Happen in 2007

There are so many lists about the amazing things that happened this year, and at the risk of sounding cynical, there are a few things I was hoping would happen that didn't. I think 2008 will see some of these things happening. Social Networking in the Enterprise Corporations over a certain size have a terrible time maintaining internal communication and coordination. Different groups within the same company duplicate efforts because they are in silos that don't talk to each other, and expert...

Firefox on Mac Hint

This seems pretty obvious, but some Mac + Firefox users may appreciate it. I recently upgraded to OS X Leopard, and one of the things I really like is the stacks feature. This isn't a mind blowing feature, but as someone who doesn't like a lot of files on the desktop, but does like quick, easy access, it works quite nicely. Safari automatically downloads files to the downloads stack, and I was irritated that by default FireFox downloads files to the desktop. As someone who tries out a lot of ...

Good Advice

LinuxWorld has good advice for companies: Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of [Perl or PHP] hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don't overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works. Via Kottke.org. This speaks to what I call 'analysis paralysis' that you see in many large organizations (not jus...

The Right Sort of Software

Did you even want to work on a document with a full featured desktop client, but have the flexibility to access it anywhere and collaborate with others easily? Sure you have, most everyone has. downloadsquad is featuring an article on a new OpenOffice extension that offers import/export between OO and Google Docs. This is an exciting first step, and one I certainly need to try out. I think we all dream of a "write anywhere, access anywhere" method of authoring and managing documents, but that...

What Google is Doing Right

One of the key things Google is doing correctly is making it easy to access Google services from a variety of places and a variety of devices. Just today a mobile version of Google's Notebook service was released (found here). Suddenly, Google Notebook has become nearly as valuable to me as del.icio.us. The key element is Google is increasing the value of their services, increasing the stickiness, and increasing the general use per person (and therefore advertising). For example, with Gmail I...