There's a lot of ranting, but very little substance. Save yourself the trouble from reading it.
It reminds me a bit of an anti-Atlas Shrugged
82 karma · joined September 3, 2012
It reminds me a bit of an anti-Atlas Shrugged
A lot of this gets covered in retrospectives. Making sure that you don't repeat similar mistakes over and over again and that the team is evolving rather than becoming static. I tend to focus more on how well we hit our goals (including business goals) so that will include things like, "Are we getting better at estimates?" It could also informally include, are Dev1 and Dev2 arguing less and communicating better?
I usually leave metrics to the product side. Find your version of Facebook's "7 friends in 10 days"
Specifically I suspect the note belongs to a "Conflicting Changes" notebook, which gets automatically created a note you are trying to upsync conflicts with a copy already on the server. There might be other sync errors that trigger this as well.
If you look at the screenshot of the Mac app, the note belongs to a notebook that starts with "Con..." rather than something like "cherian's notebook" as seen in the screenshot from the Web app.
Users who run into this get a sync error and a modal dialog explaining that their copy of the note is placed into a local notebook titled, "Conflicting Changes [Date/timestamp]" There should be another copy of the note on the Evernote servers. It is possible that when Cherian saw this, he deleted the copy of the note on the Evernote servers and kept the local copy, which would be the opposite of what he'd want to do. (Total guess)
I would guess that this happened very early on and Cherian has been adding & editing this note locally in that local notebook, but not realizing it. The dialog can be a little confusing, and many of us just click away modal dialogs without thinking about it too much.
If you primarily ever work out of All Notes, you may not pay much attention to which notebooks your notes are in. Especially if you only edit that one note on the desktop. If you worked between desktop and mobile and/or web it would be easy to immediately notice that note missing entirely.
It is possible that there wasn't anything wrong with the note as the customer support agent said, but rather the note was just in a local notebook. Copy/pasting it into a new note would solve it in either case.
Local Notebooks exist only for the desktop clients. You can create one to put in notes you don't want sync'd up to the Evernote service. They're also a place to store notes if you're out of this month's quota.
Source: Customer Support agents escalate up to specialists, which eventually escalates up to Product Management. Almost exclusively with really weird and hairy problems.
That phrase is a gem
That doesn't mean Microsoft isn't doing well. Their recent announcements and PR has been great (something they've always been good at). Microsoft just still has a big hill to climb
This was always the infuriating part of making a Win8 app, the guidelines were terrible and you could either follow them to try and feel like a native app (with a sucky UX) or you could tweak them or invent your own, which made your app feel like a one-off with a steeper learning curve
Articulate your anger more clearly. And if you're making a historical reference, make sure people get the gist of it even if they don't get the reference
Here is this piece of paper, I promise you it is worth this much at this time.
I wouldn't necessarily say that 'consumers aren't rational' but I definitely agree that many components and qualities that make a product valuable cannot be easily measured and quantified.
Perhaps Christiansen will come up with a new best seller. I mean an updated theory. Well both, hopefully
Here's the list: 1. Viral Marketing 2. Public Relations (PR) 3. Unconventional Public Relations 4. Search Engine Marketing 5. Social and Display Ads 6. Offline Advertising 7. Search Engine Optimization 8. Content Marketing 9. Email Marketing 10. Engineering as Marketing 11. Targeting Blogs 12. Business Development 13. Sales 14. Affiliate Programs 15. Existing Platforms 16. Trade Shows 17. Offline Events 18. Speaking Engagements 19. Community Building
I'd like to point out that under "Targeting Blogs" the first sentence begins with, "While it could fall under PR..."
A lot of these 19 items overlap with each other, so if you're going to do that, at least make it an even 20 ok? And you don't get to use the word traction, you're going to ruin it.
Now get off my lawn grumble grumble
If you really want to start, let's begin with QWERTY keyboards
We're mostly not in the top 1% (I'm looking at you Calacanis) but we are the upper-ish 1% or at the very least, a very weird 1%
These are the people we build products for
If you're close to a major beta release, make sure that happens on time and as smoothly as possible. Then, as Paul Graham says, know your users. Talk to them, email them, Skype them late at night and into the wee hours of the morning. That's where expertise matters the most and where you're on equal ground with everyone else. I don't know anything about your users yet either. Well, I might know a tiny bit by accident because I worked on something similar. So go learn more than me.
To quote PG: "This class can teach you about startups, but that is not what you need to know. What you need to know to succeed in a startup is not expertise in startups, what you need is expertise in your own users.
Mark Zuckerberg did not succeed at Facebook because he was an expert in startups, he succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups; I mean Facebook was first incorporated as a Florida LLC. Even you guys know better than that. He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups because he understood his users very well."
Beyond that, I would say expect there to be what feels like near-death business/startup experiences.
If you run into trouble, great! That means you're doing something right. It isn't like school where if you prep enough, everything should be smooth sailing. You're not going to be able to ever prep enough and everything should feel chaotic. If it all goes really well, it is possible that you're super oblivious.
It is ok if things aren't going that well. Treat all the lows like team bonding. If you're lucky this won't be the last or worst of it all and nothing kills a startup like a cofounder who is only in it for the good times.
Yeah, I'm not clear how excited he'd be if Microsoft was a major player in mobile. I think if that were the case, we'd just get the same article but with 'triopoly' instead.
Also, did he say custom boot animations? I don't think that's what is holding us back... better examples would strengthen his argument