The FuzzyBlog!
Marketing 101. Consulting 101. PHP Consulting. Random geeky stuff. I Blog Therefore I Am.

Saturday, May 18, 2002

Hey!  MP3s for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference Available Already The Dr. Dobb's Journal Technetcast is one of those websites that's way cool if you're geeky enough and just silly if you aren't.  Technetcast offers MP3 files and Real Audio streams of interesting conferences and programming topics.  For example, you can write code while listening to Linus talking about Linux.  Or you might listen to Andy Hertzfeld on Eazel or Jon Bentley or Larry Wall.  Maybe I'm just weird but I find it more than a bit inspiring.  Now you can even get some of the MP3s from the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference from here: http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_catalog.html?item_id=1314 Four or five are available including Rick Rashid from Microsoft talking on next generation operating systems (interesting: linguistic analysis is coming right to the OS and to office; too bad for www.autonomy.com and other search firms). Obligatory Disclaimer: Previous author for Dr. Dobb's Journal and builder of multiple CD-ROM titles for them; no current relationship.  Current author for O'Reilly. 10:32:13 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

For the Record I Don't Always Hate Microsoft In my With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility post I pointed out that if you're going to rant when people screw up then you have the obligation to also suck it up and be honest when they're good.  Even though my work day started with Word 2000 GPFing and losing my work (just don't mention auto save please -- it doesn't always work), I then happened to open my files in Word XP.  Here's what those files look like in Word XP: These are the edited files for my part on the O'Reilly blog book.  I knew that Nat had added edits but in Word 2000, as far as I know, these are only displayed when you hover over the highlighted note.  This makes notes a one by one thing as opposed to this new "call out notes" which completely changes the character of notes (at least for me).  Global views of data are __good__. Good Job Microsoft!  This is a real improvement to Word for collaborative writing.   8:13:58 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Marketing 101: When Your Market Gets Commoditized, Part 1 One of the most difficult marketing challenges you can ever face is what to do when your product or service becomes an off the shelf commodity.  In this article we're going to illustrate this first with theory and then with an example of what a vendor of email server software might choose to do.  In the next commoditization article we'll cover it from the example of a web development consulting firm.  In the third and final part we'll go over additional commoditization issues like pricing. The term commodity is used by economists to indicate an "undifferentiated good or service".  The classic example of a commodity is something like butter or wheat -- there just isn't much difference between butter or wheat from vendor A to vendor B.  The term commoditization indicates what happens when a market moves from the status of a differentiated good to a commodity.  For example, when no one knew how to make butter except for one or two farms, butter was not  a commodity.  And it had a premium price.  When everyone knows how to make butter then it becomes a commodity and prices fall.  Think about it: Do you really care what brand of butter you buy?  ==> Read Story <== 5:54:06 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This