Big news that Joel Spolsky is ending his Joel on Software blog as announced in Inc. The money quote:
To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company.
It is true. It has to be bigger than yourself and it does take a lot of time to blog. A lot of people are disappointed. He has a company to run. His choice. The audience will move elsewhere. The video below is a re-post but relevant on the power of blogging. I find myself talking about my tiny little blog more than I ever thought I would. It is true that my traffic is tiny and likely irrelevant. I blog to build my brand and make me better. The blog forces you to think and stay relevant. It is mental pull-ups, push-ups and sit-ups all in one.
I am looking forward to digging into their new book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. As part of the inevitable book launch, they have been producing articles and blog posts fast and furious. I came across this one on Van Halen from Heather Hamilton and her excellent One Louder blog. Turns out that the brown M&M’s were used as a signal to make sure their contracts were read and understood.
I never did get to see Van Halen in their prime (pre-Hagar). Since I grew up in Chicago, we will always have that summer of 1984, Jump and the Chicago Cubs. I did get a chance to catch DLR at the House of Blues in Hollywood for a New Year’s Eve bash a few years ago. No doubt DLR is a party. Great time and great show. I still truly think that “Panama” should be the national anthem of Panama.
I have blogged a bunch on Gist over the last year. The Seattle startup has some nice traction going for it. It seemed pretty clear to me from the beginning that Gist would be a great CRM and/or Sales Enablement tool for the small to mid-size market. Check this nice blog on that at this link: Gist as a small business CRM tool.
Interesting weekend read at the Wall Street Journal on a bond-trading specialist from Cantor Fitzgerald that wants to treat casinos like the stock market.
Great read on customer service over @ Inc. Great way to improve product and process simultaneously. Would your organization obsess like this? Maybe you should.
They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?” If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.
Lots of chatter about iPad as the Kindle killer. The chatter is bunk. Kindle has a specific target audience, a niche. That niche loves the Kindle. Niche is the new critical mass.
Look at some of the advantages Kindle has:
Battery Life. Kindle can last up to 7 days without a charge. Seriously.
Content delivery. Kindle has it included. No extra charges or higher price tag.
Readability. Do you want to read a backlit screen all day?
Opening an App Store that people will care about.
The iPad is a very slick device, but it will not be the only one to change the tablet game. Apple App Store developers will start to run into some of the issues that cross-platform mobile developers are dealing with. Namely screen size and incompatible devices. Apple has been very smart with their device hardware and software release cycles. This will become more difficult as different devices begin to proliferate. The iPad will face way more competition than the iPod. Repeating success is, in fact, harder than initial success. Other players and other platforms (HP, Asus, Dell, Everyone on Microsoft or Android) are ready this time. My take is that the biggest losers will be the publishers. Their pricing models will now be more fully exposed to the buying public. That new knowledge will suppress their margins.
For many years I have found the notion of price controls interesting mainly because there is vast amounts of historical evidence that state they do not work. Time after time, price controls are put forward as a solution, most recently in Venezuela. Interesting read at Forbes that tracts price controls back to Diocletian, which came as a surprise to this Catholic school boy who only knew about his Christian persecutions.
All the incredible and horrible stories from the Haiti earthquake made me think of an article I awhile back in Forbes. Digicel CEO Denis O’Brien has brought mobile telecommunications to the world’s poorest countries. Digicel has been a large part of the surviving communications infrastructure in Haiti and has offered €3.5m in charitable funding. It would be frightening to think what Haiti would look like right now without Digicel.
by Chip and Dan Heath. It is engaging and practical and a worthwhile read. I have found myself recommending it lately. Great resources on 
. As part of the inevitable book launch, they have been producing articles and blog posts fast and furious. I came across this one on Van Halen from Heather Hamilton and her excellent