Jinn of Quality and Risk

Gordon Meyer (Usable Help): The Frequently Asked Questions format is a great grass-roots convention for keeping email and discussion list traffic low. But creating a list, or worse yet, making it part of a documentation suite, is silly. Particularly when it comes to products. The better approach is to revise the product and documentation, based on real-world feedback, to ensure that the questions aren't so frequently posed. If you're able to pre-anticipate the questions, then reflect that in the product from the beginning. 

Mitch Kapor: Announcing a project without having code to show, that is, committing an act of vaporware, is generally not regarded as a best practice in the software world. It lessens credibility and heightens cynicism. So why did we do just that? 

James Woudhuysen (Guardian): Companies that think IT's key purpose is to cut costs are being short-sighted. There are multiple keys to the value of IT: productivity (think leverage for the mind), innovation (think real-time tracking of parcels across the world), connection (think community-building, knowledge sharing, remote presence), effectiveness (do the right thing, better, faster, and cheaper), and precision control (think vacuum-cleaning robots, washing machines, colour printing, fly-by-wire). 

Michael Matas: Omni is launching an icon and user interface consulting service to help Mac OS X developers make their apps feel more at home on OS X. There are lots of programmers out there, but let's face it, not all of them are artists.