This is well written, and the biggest takeaway is probably the content precedes design line, which I think is pretty key.
On a side note, noticing that this is .ie, I can't help but try to read the article in my head with an Irish accent. But I've been watching a TV show set in Scotland recently (The Book Group, on Hulu), so I'm pretty sure I'm actually reading it in some bastardized Irish/Scottish accent that would surely get me killed in either place.
It's more like dogs playing in a bar. Nobody is really talking much, they are just exerting social power and forming groups and having a good time. If you aren't obsessed with socializing, it would be really boring, and even shamefully so.
Ahhh it actually sounds like your team was originally being Agile
This statement is unfalsifiable; this kind of retroactive defense makes Agile out to be an ever-moving goalpost. If any effective, basically "good," organic team behaviour was "Agile" to begin with, there is no identifiable differentiating criterion of Agile methodology from any other mode of small-scale collaboration.
The author shows insight. The key thing that he realized is that for Nike, etc, run-tracking apps seem to be treated as branding tools to help them sell more shoes. In essence, his company is getting free advertising via Nike's ads. As they sell more of their pedometer hardware, he gets new potential customers.
Likewise, this special circumstance makes it a bit difficult to extrapolate from his success to another situation. If the giant arrives and actually intends to wrest control of the segment from you and profit from it per se, the situation will play out differently.
> "These higher skills have become commodities, said Catherine L. Mann, a global finance professor at the Brandeis University International Business School who studies the outsourcing of jobs. The programming language “C++ is now an international language,” she said. “If that’s all you know, then you’re competing with people in India or China who will do the work for less.”
This was the most interesting part of the article to me. Ruby on Rails is relatively obscure. Scaling web sites is relatively obscure. I bet there is a latency, probably inversely proportional to market size, between when a specialized tech skill is originated and when it has disseminated sufficiently that it can be outsourced.
So, there can be a simultaneous shortage and surplus: a shortage of talented developers working with recent technology, and a surplus of talented (and otherwise) developers who are only familiar with older technology.
The comparison between the iPod Touch and the iPhone is an apples-and-oranges issue, but there's clearly some psychology involved in the price difference between the $229 8GB and $299 32GB version.
The $229 model seems to serve as an anchor price at the bottom end of the range that makes the $299 or $399 look more attractive. $299 sounds like a great price for a 32GB model, a "way better deal" than the 8GB one, especially because I'm sure most people compare the price of an iPod in terms of dollars-per-gigabyte rather than the incremental cost of more flash.
You also see it with AT&T's smartphone data plans -- you feel you're getting some kind of a deal with a $25/month 2GB plan, because the $15/month 200MB plan is utterly terrible in comparison.
I am voting for runkeeper.com for the win. I have a Forerunner GPS thingy in a drawer and use Runkeeper exclusively. Why would I buy yet another electronic thingy from Adidas or Nike or anyone else?
And why would I use one of the big guys' apps? They have ulterior motives and designs on my wallet and I can smell it. I'll stay away.
Count me in with the "Are you kidding me?" crowd. The iPhone's $199 price tag can only be compared to another device that also has a two year contract and a data subscription that increases TCO by $720.
My bozo bit for this Ben Kunz is permanently flipped.
I've always thought that you should make the plans & pricing page provide more information than simply your plans & pricing. The most obvious one is to clarify or explain features. That way, you can legitimately funnel more people to the plans & pricing page and gently move them one step closer to a conversion.
One thing that left me wondering was the last paragraph:
The total visits to our website rose 48% in a 30 day period. The most visited page (after the front-page) was the Sign Up page, and 2nd was our Features Page. Our sales improved by up to a 45%, and we have had the biggest growth Webbynode has seen in 2 years.
If visits increased 48% and sales increased 45%, it doesn't seem like there was a big jump in conversion rate. Maybe they meant that the sales conversion rate increased 45%, which would be impressive.
The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.
Nevertheless, many high-tech companies large and small say they are struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the United States.
“We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco. “I do think we’re still chasing them, not the other way around.”
Apple also obscures references by making its products look like nothing else, from the first iPod with a unique scroll wheel to the current iterations wrapped in gleaming aluminum. Apple seems wondrously unique, until you consider aluminum is the same material you wrap leftover fish in and then it hits you: Apple is disguising itself so you can't compare prices. Is the new $99 Apple TV box a good deal? Who knows? It looks like nothing else on the planet.
These points are kind of ridiculous. Aluminum cases aren't a Jobsian conspiracy to make it difficult to evaluate the costs and benefits of Apple products; they're because aluminum allows you to make a nicer-feeling computer case.
And anybody who knows about Rokus, Boxees, and all the other streaming set-top boxes can evaluate the price of the new tv.
I think that's the problem. Everyone wants talented developers.
Many companies can no longer afford to hire less talented developers who many have been able to get a job in a booming economy.
And I'm not mentioning the millions of liberal arts majors who used to be quietly employed but now are finding that many companies simply don't want or need them.
That's why I think the recession and unemployment will persist for a very long time- many of those lost jobs just aren't coming back.
I don't really agree. Yes in some respects and for some purposes the independent claims are the most important parts of a patent, but reading only the independent claims is very different from reading a patent.
The specification and drawings are important as they, among other things, define the meaning of the claims. Usually, if you just skip ahead to the independent claims you will have no idea what the claims are talking about. This is especially true in the electronics/software/online arts where people tend to make up their terminology as they go along.
Early on, before a leader in the PC market was established, investors had the choice of betting which horse would win--Bill Gates at Microsoft or Steve Jobs at Apple.
Many people did get rich betting on Gates, so indirectly, yes, Bill Gates does show that people have gotten rich betting against Jobs. The hyperbole is nice, but only that--hyperbole.
"He has not designed a single project" is a bit of a strawman argument. What Jobs does is focus a team of designers and engineers on creating a product that is really satisfying to use. It doesn't sound like much, but if it's easy, how come no company but Apple seems to be able to do it?
Anyway here is a Mac application that applies some of Jef Raskin's ideas to a finder alternative: http://www.raskinformac.com/
"When President Eisenhower proposed the Open Skies Policy at the 1995 summit meeting to the Soviet delegation in Geneva, it was an unsuccessful move to legitimate the US' plans to launch the U2 spy plane a month later."
Unless Eisenhower returned in zombie form in the 1990s, in an alternate dimension where the USSR was still around in the middle of that decade, I highly doubt it.
It took John Grisham three years (1984-1987) to write "A Time To Kill", and it wasn't published until 1989 because he couldn't find a publisher. Fast forward to 2010 -- in an op-ed to the NY Times, he says that writing is the most difficult and frustrating job he has ever had. Isn't that astonishing? Grisham, arguably one of the most accomplished fiction writers of the past three decades, says writing is hard. Harder than being a lawyer who primarily handles indigent cases, being on an asphalt crew in summer, selling men's underwear, and being a politician, in fact.
Other than that, the key point I noted was that writing was not his childhood dream, a practiced hobby, or even a well-researched attempt at changing careers. It was something he decided to do one day and found to be incredibly difficult, but kept at it.. ultimately becoming a monumental success.
