thesethings

Thanks for the TMA link. Hadn't heard of that trait before in that language.

Have you heard of the Kolbe spectrum/ test?

It helped me evaluate my strengths/weakness a lot. It's unfortunately not free, which I think prevents it from attaining the credibility it deserves.

I really like the way it thinks: http://www.kolbe.com/ (No affiliation.)

It has a TMA-esque category It really helped me self-diagnose... and diagnose others, heh heh.

Basically it got me off of binary skill judgement of both myself and others. (Less "that person is awesome!" or "that person sucks!" and more about how job design is usually the issue, rather than people.)

Definitely agree about the administrative stuff! Stanford videos have that, too. (At least the ones I've seen.)

Men's looks are brought up far less often to begin with. (By either gender.)

Yesterday I was reading a highly caustic anti-BoingBoing screed. Everything about the male writer was idealogical. Almost everything about the female writer was about her looks.

This is where somebody on HN might ask for "citation please." In this case, I think that would be a bit disingenuous.

Heh. I should have been more clear.

I've "onboarded" (enterprisey word for orienting/registering/supporting/creating accounts for new hires) many new employees disoriented/frustrated by their new org's tools.

What often happens when a new hire really disagrees with his/her new tool for task is that they only use it for the "last mile" of the transaction.

So... say they have to turn in an expense report in Excel template. But they like some other app. They will take all their notes in $preferred_app, do all their editing in $preferred_app, and at the last step, export to Excel template.

You should see the machinations I've seen around mail. Convoluted downloading and parsing from Exchange servers with shell scripts... hah.

In any case... this is not ideal. What this does is make users absorb complexity for IT. IT can get comfortable wtih a platform, too leery to try something else. But users, often years into new generations of workflows (not just young people, so many older employees have been using Gmail for years in their personal life for example.), absorb the blow.

I think 37signals is half-right, but the other part of the dynamic is that enterprise software is "hidden," while consumer/web software is public.

Things suffer in the dark longer than they suffer in the light.

HP/IBM/BMC web interfaces for (intranet) products sold _this year_ would be laughed off the public web in five seconds (really bad frames, client-side Java applets, etc).

(Not to mention the poor organizations buying this stuff tend to have it for about 5 years post-purchase.)

That said, the dynamic is changing. Enterprise software/IT is getting consumerized. Sometimes unofficially (everybody uses their ipad at work, but gets/expects no help), sometimes officially (Google Apps has been adopted by some big organizations. Its enterprise product is slightly different from the consumer Google apps, but it's really dang close.)

Big business aside, I believe about 10 million students use Google Apps as their official collab/email tool (not counting people's personal accounts. And Google adds a few big schools every month.). These students simply won't arrive at their jobs post-graduation willing to use Lotus Notes + .doc attachments.

Younger workers aren't the only thing leading to the consumerization of IT, there's a lot of influence coming from the Internet, and consumer hardware.

I don't want to hijack the thread, feel free to crawl my profile to find other places where I write about this stuff. Consumerization of old-school IT is my new pet area of research.

Yep. Plus the fact that Apple went out of their way to deny the exchange (something they've never done before with I-emailed-Steve stories), suggests that this is fake.

But BGR is sticking with it for now.

Boy Genius Report updated the post with full (email) headers. For now it looks like they're sticking with the story:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/07/01/exclusive-conversa...

Nice write-up, and a good compliment to the other one linked in this thread. Yours gave a great description of atmosphere/ vibe/ social tone.

I wrote about it at length here: http://thesethings.posterous.com/rapping-grandmas-and-ninja-...

Short version: It was initially a helpful construct to suggest that:

* Your potential place of work was not stuffy. That the applicant could seek relief from their horrible bank job. (This signal is now false given that boring bank jobs say "rockstar." :D )

* The applicant will be respected and treated well (like a rockstar), not a codemonkey.

Nowadays, "rockstar" implies the applicant must be all-skilled, all-talented, with no burden on the potential place of work to live up to anything suggested by use of the word :)

Just a heads up. Now that the presentations are over, the recording can be found at this URL: http://www.justin.tv/ycombinator/b/265435483

Thanks for recording it.

I have a theory:

I don't think their backgrounds are a response to Bing at all.

Somebody high up at Google (won't name any names) is a sincere, enthusiastic patron of the arts, and wants to share the gift of art with the world.

(I love art, but I think this mission is misguided, and wrong place, wrong time.)

Google has had TONS of novelty background/skin campaigns for iGoogle, Chrome, and other properties. (Often including prominent artists and designers.)

The home page is just the most recent victim.

The problem is not about quality of the art, which is usually great. It's just about it serving the user/tool, which it doesn't.

I do like the holiday/themed Google logos (pacman anybody?). But I consider those a completely different initiative.

Anyway... I repeat: It's not a Bing thing. It's a bring-art-to-the-masses thing. :/

Some great points.

I'm trying to think how i can edit the comment, while preserving my main point (that there was something distinct there, but it seemed less like drunk/under the influence, and more like ________).

Your comment just spurred me to watch the video.

I noticed something, too.

[Edit. I previously ID'd a specific condition. While I stick by my observation, and would comfortably say the same thing in a hallway conversation, it's probably not cool to say it in a public forum. I'm in no way important or a shareholder in any company involved in this discussion. But a commenter below got me thinking. HN is a widely-read, influential place. I don't want my passing observation to be responsible for anybody's pain.]

The OP is both right and wrong.

Ballmer may not be the best visionary, product person, or have a good nose for the market.

But I really don't think MS could do anything to compete with the Internet era, and its results would likely be extremely similar with Gates in charge.

Also... let's not be revisionist. Gates was there long enough into the Internet era for us to know what he thought/how he responded. His attitude and approach was quite similar, and in some ways worse.

He was much less complicit to web standards on both the client and server sides.

These days, MS's intranet products retain this approach (Sharepoint), but its Internet ones are really good citizens and saying all the right things (Azure, PHP friendliness. Silverlight is old-school, but still less borg-y than stuff released in Gates-era). It's only that we have absolutely no reason to use the MS web-stack, and (rightfully)have trust issues that explains their lack of popularity.

So yeah... Ballmer is a dork. But MS's gradual demise is a natural effect of the Innovator's Dilemma and the Internet.

(My interpretation of events.)

Philosophically she's one of the least divisive thought leaders I've come across. (She would hate the term "thought leader," and never claim it. I just use it as a shortcut to describe somebody who has a specific philosophy/advice, above their own persona.)

In fact, I've yet to meet anybody who actually knows her ideas, that even disagrees with them, let alone doesn't like her. Maybe this is because her work is not "against" anything, and generally positive/enthusiastic.

(Unlike say, somebody who is a startup bootstrapping evangelist. That person would probably talk about how evil venture capital is, and end up being very divisive. Kathy Sierra's work involve no such equation, though funnily enough, she says that divisive work is usually a good sign. DHH loves and quotes this of course :D.)

Back to the incident: There was a forum of some people who thought they were performing a public service by calling out some semi-famous thought leaders. This wasn't limited to female people, but there were a few objects of their ire that were female, and the trash talk was definitely gender specific. This forum, not unlike 4chan, was more caught up in its own dynamic and emotion than having a specific ideology. Nobody could really say what they were for. They talked trash constantly.

It also probably attracted new members who were 10x more sketchy/scary/clueless than the OG crowd. This is a common community dynamic.

Some people took the Kathy Sierra trashing way too far, including some too-elaborate-for-comfort graphic depictions.

Was it just a harmless troll? Was it somebody new and insane and serious? Was it really about Kathy Sierra, or was it just bad luck to be chosen as the object of attention, a la 4chan?

The threats spread outside of the site, got more specific/direct/ violent, and Kathy Sierra cancelled a major appearance (the reason I know this story kinda of well is only because I was attending that event, etech, and it was very special occasion/big deal for me, and I paid extra to attend a tutorial by her :D)

People who never specifically admitted to being involved in the initial trash-talking, jumped in to pish-posh the fear/concern over the events, and defend free speech.

As far as I know, they never figured out who sent out the death threats, but did figure out some of the horrible trollers. Possible, but unproven that they were the same folks. Possible, and hopefully not true, that the initial stuff was garden-variety trolling, and later stuff was a seriously dangerous crazy person.

Some people have dismissed the incident as overblown, blending the off-site death threats, with the initial forum trolling.

I personally think they're two separate conversations. I think the initial trolling was horrible and depressing, but somewhat normal. But that the later threats were too disturbing and rare of an occurrence to be dismissed.

sidebar: Though the death threats did lead to a talk cancellation, and curtailing of her blog, it did not make her retire. She's given many talks since (duh, the top of this thread is about a recent great one). And her recent departure from Twitter is not the result of anything gnarly happening.

sidebar ps: Almost any post about a Kathy Sierra talk/essay/quote ends up being about missing her/ the unfortunate death threat incident. This is totally understandable. That said, I hope nobody misses the opportunities to learn from and benefit her transformational philosophies. Elsewhere in this thread I discuss the actual video, and how her ideas are as important as Lean, in terms of how they should influence what we do.

This is a great talk. Though unrelated to Lean, Kathy Sierra's philosophy is similar in that it describes a "simple" mindset that has the potential to change the way you think about your product and business process for the rest of your days.

My only complaint is that there isn't a pithy catchphrase to describe it, or a larger cult evangelizing/writing about it, like Lean has.

When attempting to encapsulate Kathy Sierra's ideas, I often use the phrase "customer-centric," but I think people misinterpret it. (That said, "Lean" has a similar problem, people often think it means "budget" or simple.)

People often take Customer-Centric as a value judgement, that it means be nice to people or something like that. (By all means, we should be nice to people, but Customer-Centric is not about something so subjective.)

Just as Lean is a How, so is Customer-Centric. It's basically about focusing on how your business transforms your customer, not your product/brand (these things get worked on of course, but in the name of results for the customer).

I also think that Lean and Customer-Centric are greatly compatible, and focus each other. Anybody into Lean should check this talk out.

Fair enough distinction, I'll edit.

Did you check out the whole OP?

I feel the dev's complaint was more nuanced than complaining about fragmentation.

The dev was saying there were tons of easy back-ports left on the table that could make the fragmentation much easier for developers to deal with. I walked away feeling that some released Android versions were neglected, more than fragmented.

[edited last sentence to distinguish neglected versions from not caring about the whole platform, which Google obviously does.]

The streaming URL is at a different domain than the event's site, http://opensourcebridge.org/.

You can see the schedule there.

Sidebar: I smiled when you described Bill Buxton as "wish he was my uncle," because amongst friends I call Paul Graham, Tim OReilly, and Kathy Sierra, "Uncle Paul," "Uncle Tim," And "Cousin Kathy."

It started because I was getting slightly made fun of for quoting them so often... like I knew them. So I kinda upped the joke ante by saying stuff like, "Uncle Paul always says ______."

One thing I'm doing, is NOT pursuing a degree program. This enables me to do lots more "a la carte" class-picking.

I've had mixed response from the schools I've talked to about this. The admin folks seem mildly confused/insulted, but the profs are cool usually. It does take more overhead to explain your situation, meet w/profs to get out of prereqs, but it's pretty do-able.

Anybody reading this site knows that college is not a necessary step on the way to entrepreneurship, including you.

But less talked about it is the "journey" part.

As long one is in touch with personal motivations and goals, then college seems fine.

You're in no rush, financially comfortable, and as eager for experiences as you are your innovative product. I'd say college sounds like a cool idea. I'd just be careful to pick a good program, otherwise it could be painful/frustrating.

I'm about to go to college part-time with no professional necessity at all. I'm in a different spot than the OP. I don't have a first degree. But I do have a fine geeky career that I'm about to step out of to start a business (way less capital intensive than his idea :D ), and am going to college with the hope of learning a subject matter, but no real expectations. Just mostly for the experience.

There is at least one Canadian school amongst the 8 millions students using Google Apps as their official suite.

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/case_studies/lakehe...

I'm betting that Google or a 3rd party will eventually piggy back a for-pay educational tool on the existing Google Apps school customer-base through their Marketplace.

Just to the cloud point, as of early May, 8 million students and counting use Google Apps as the official choice of their school.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/schools-are-almost-ou...

Ha... I definitely get what you mean. Others have compared these "rich site" apps to CD-ROM, another dis.

I think they are generally uninteresting, and not "the future," but could be an OK short-term product idea for legacy media companies. (But not business model)

Old-school publishing companies have lots customers who might not exercise the same effort in discovery that you and i do.

Let's compare to familiar territory: tech companies:

Shrinking technology paradigms (giant life cycle desktop OS's like Microsoft Windows, Sun's SPARC) can launch new products, and make money off of shrinking, but existing customers. That doesn't mean they're being realistic about how to survive the future. Or that these "short burst" products are a good use of their time. (Sun maybe spent too much time denying SPARC's disappearance. MS seems to be doing just fine with Windows 7.)

Coming back to magazine apps... it's a short-term blast kind of thinking. Sometimes those things work out great, and get you enough money to survive to the next era... sometime it doesn't. I won't buy 'em. But depending on what else is going on inside of their organization, I don't necessarily blame msm for trying it out.

Exactly. MUNI (SF's bus service) is by many measures irresponsible, incompetent, and corrupt. It even runs a late a lot. But the density of the city simply creates such a high frequency of buses, and coverage of routes, that it results in a very practical, pragmatic service to use. Even really well off people often don't have cars in SF just because having a car is more of a hassle than taking the bus/BART/extremely occasional cab. We know from Paul's blog (awesome blog, Paul!) that he really likes cars. When even he is thinking of ditching it, it says a lot about the service.

Sidebar: I currently live in Portland, which has an award-winning bus/rail service. And it is true, it's awesome. The drivers are polite, and often really care about urban planning/civic stuff. The buses are clean, the documentation/data/maps/API well-done.

But because Portland is so much less dense than SF, it still means that in many cases, taking a bus here is more of a drag, and cars more common. (On a personal note, I've gotten way more into biking since moving here from SF.)

Gmail lets you use IMAP, which is as nice of an email transfer option as one could hope for in 2010. (http://www.dataliberation.org/google/gmail) You can even export your filters. - The article doesn't mention if the new Hotmail will support IMAP. The current one makes you have some strange "Windows Live" client as far as I know.

In this way I don't see it as Gmail imposing the switching cost (one could move away to lots of other providers or self-hosting).

Yeah, I watched it on the stream, and it contextualizes a lot. The interview was not full-on jokey, but it was dry/acerbic and friendly. I would call it "playful sparring."

I really, really recommend reading The Millionaire Next Door (I have no affiliation with it. It's kinda old-school, but in no way out of date.).

Almost the entire book is about how luxury goods are NOT consumed by rich people, but by semi-struggling middle class people. (BMW's, Rolex, premium liquor, etc.) (Or at least people who have to go in to debt to consume these things.)

(It's also about how rich people DO live, choose to buy stuff, negotiate, etc.)

Everybody in this thread who's saying, "duh, cars aren't supposed to be an investment," are technically right. And everybody should indulge in things that really make them happy. If cars are your thing, go on, do your thing. It's all good.

But in the Millionaire Next Door, it goes over how cars are an especially precarious purchase for most people, as they just really eat up a lot of money over time. For most people, even non-luxury car purchases require a loan.

Cars might be more dangerous for us than say Rolexes, because most of us think "well either way I have to have a car, might as well get a _____."

Anyway, maybe this article wasn't the most persuasive case, but it is true. Most rich people don't have fancy cars, or probably fancy anything.

(In the Millionaire Next Door, it says we get confused by this because there are a famous outliers who show off their wealth, so we incorrectly associate wealth with luxury, when they're rarely related.)

Thanks so much for posting this.

I wish the TC post was less, "this random circumstance happened to me," and more about what you mention above: prepaid is a good fit for MANY people. (And not to mention the growing data > voice divide that is driving some of us to prepaid.)