Powerful structures for product-driven organisations
Whatever shape the buttons on your laptop, Microsoft has spent the last few days at PDC revealing some very interesting ideas about what the future of computing may hold. Yet, with every news story - about the release of an abstracted operating system idea, about a new operating system with some nice looking UI elements,… Continue reading Fighting the blue monster
Whilst I entirely agree on Google's position on Proposition 8 in California, the very act of Google coming out with a political opinion on an issue of this sort raises the question, again, of how comfortable we are with the power that Google has over our lives. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but for… Continue reading No vote
More news from the department of 'if Microsoft did it, they'd be strung up from a lamp post but if Apple does it, no one cares' department. It seems that you have to be so cool to be a member of the apple app creators' club that you're not allowed to even talk to the… Continue reading Hostage for a fortune
I think it was Stephen Fry who pointed out the brilliant redundancy in the Martini advertising slogan 'any time, any place, anywhere', wondering out loud what possible difference there could be between the phrase 'any place' and 'anywhere'. That, of course, had been entirely overlooked by the advertising copywriter in search of a more elegant… Continue reading Any time, any place, anywhere
Here I am somewhere else talking about Google Chrome.
It's a funny industry, the web industry. What started out for many of us as a job creating digital expressions has fast become the job of watching the world change how it communicates with itself and then coming up with ways in which we, or our clients, might fit into it all. Buoyed up by… Continue reading Abstraction and absurdity
It's not really going to be a good DM idea of course. I can't stand the stuff. Instead it's really an anti-junk mail idea. And it is also - entirely coincidentally - an idea that might help solve some of the problems of The Royal Mail, all those sweet little rural post office and red post… Continue reading A good DM idea
Adaptive Path may be brillaint at most things but they can't write books well. There. I've said it. 'Subject to Change' is the new AP book. And it's an absolute whirlwind tour of ideas surround design, design strategy, the future of organisations and consumer marketing and how to build software systems to deliver great experiences with agile development methodologies. It's virtually… Continue reading Subject to terrible writing
Seth Godin here, picks up on a subject which Russell Davies discussed in Campaign last year. The Uncanny Valley. That topic is actually about when robotics (and the like) become too believable, and people begin to respond less well to them. How does this work in marketing? For me, it's a bit like when you… Continue reading It’s uncanny
I've commented before a couple of times that Microsoft could release the MacBook or iPod and everyone would declare it a dud. The products that the blue monster releases which are good (Messenger, Office, Visio, the server products etc) are ignored while the company's detractors happily pick apart shortfalls of products like the Zune, or… Continue reading Apples and not apples
Leading product 