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27 April 2003 |
"I learned that the internal resources for MS employees are unbelievable. I could work their my whole life and never take advantage of all of them"
[via Scoble]
Kind of related: review of an Interviewing-at-Microsoft book, How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, and onwards from there, Malcolm Gladwell asks What do job interviews really tell us?.
11:50:20 PM 
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The 320 runs through London that the student needs to learn are known as The Blue Book.
1:41:07 PM
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VMUSA has 500,000 customers after 9 months, mostly young pre-pay, mostly due to offering good customer service, good value and understandable tariffs and products:
Virgin UK and USA are not where they are today because of brand. They have achieved such phenomenal success by focusing on giving customers what they want today; voice, ringtones, messaging and all they have ever asked for during the last 10 years of the mobile industry; decent customer service, and value for money
[...]
So the brand means nothing? No. The brand is key to successful organisation, but only when it actually means something to the customer. Ask any of Virgins customers, or even anyone in the UK what Virgin’s brand actually means, and they will all tell you a very similar story based on customer service, value, simplicity and services and tariffs they actually understand, moreover services they know how to use and need. Ask even industry observers what any of the operators’ brands actually mean, or how one brand is different from the other, and they will be stumped.
1:39:58 PM
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Microsoft is our main competitor as much of the strategic position will be in controlling the user experience more than the network. Under this point of view we see a serious danger as we could be marginalised as ISPs have been.
Judging from the experience of using Vodafone Live! over GPRS, there is much work to be done.
1:39:03 PM
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Ever notice, for example, that network series rarely have theme songs like in the old days? Thank the remote. Notice that there are no commercials between the end of one network show and the beginning of the next one? Thank the remote. Notice (if you're old enough) that the commercials themselves are more sophisticated and less annoying than the ones the TV blared in the '70s? Thank the remote. Notice those endless headlines crawling across the bottom of your screen? Thank the remote. Notice (ladies) that you can tell a lot about a guy's control issues by watching an evening of TV with him? Thank the remote.
[...]
"For all the whiz-bang predictions of what interactive TV is going to bring ... the most significant technological revolution in TV has by far been the remote TV control," said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television. "It made passivity even better."
[...]
The technology that's let you surf through this war was rooted in another one, World War I, when Germany used radio signals to guide a motorboat packed with explosives.
[via gizmodo]
1:37:45 PM
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Notes from Clay Shirky's talk at ETCON 2003.
If you're going to design a piece of social software, design for:
* All groups have a Constitution: formally instantiated in code, informally instantiated in social norms
* Handles for the user that matters. Anonymity doesn't work well for large groups, neither does weak pseudonymity. The world's best reputation system is in the emotional center of the brain. Almost all reputation systems are trivial or bad or both. Some people cheat on their wives but not at cards. eBay has done us all a disservice: non-iterated atomic transactions are the opposite of social situations. A good repuatation system just needs to let me know who you are. There has to be a penalty for switching handles.
* A way for good works to be identified -- member since, Karma, etc. A music sharing group that FedExes 180 GB HDDs back and forth gives new members the username, $SPONSOR'S_UID_MEMBERNAME
* There needs to be a cost to participate: moderators have to be around for a while. It needs to be hard to do somethings on the system: otherwise the core group won't be able to defend itself. This is anti-ease-of-use, but only for individuals, but the user of social software is the GROUP, not the USER.
* Spare the group from scale: conversations require dense, two-way conversations. Metcalfe's law is a drag. The value of a group is inverse to its size: you'll give a kidney to a smaller group than you'd give a kiss to. MeFi shuts off new users when it gets too big.
People who use your software have rights, even if you own the software.
1:37:10 PM
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© Copyright 2003 rodcorp.
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