Archive for October, 2007
Trick or Treat
I’ve always loved Halloween.
When you’re a kid, what’s not to like about dressing up, roaming around after dark, and eating candy? As parochial school kids, we had even more reason than most to love the day: we got November 1st off. (They don’t call it Halloween for nothing. The name means ’The Eve of All Hallows’, another name [...]
The Beta Joke
It seems that every new web service that appears is in “public beta,” and that granddaddy of these is Gmail, which has been in “beta” for three years. Last week Google announced that it was adding IMAP support to Gmail - a much needed improvement for anybody who accesses email from multiple devices - with [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #4
This is the fourth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.
Rule #4: In the absence of market facts, he who owns the compiler wins.
I’ve lived through this nightmare more than once and, all I can say is, even in the presence of market facts it’s plenty easy for the [...]
Saturday Mishmash
A few things from the ever-growing “blog about that!” list.
Blog search becomes useless: This item from Blog Business Summit matches what I’ve observed: blog search tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search are becoming pointless, because all you find is blog spam. I’ve about given up on them, and I wish someone would create a [...]
Macy’s Brand Killing Spree
Since Boston’s latest home grown department store, Filene’s, closed down - a depressing and protracted affair - I’ve been doing my share of sniffily, nostalgic be-pissing and be-moaning. Oh, everything is becoming that same everywhere you look. Of course, the fact that there was nothing particularly unique about Filene’s other than its name, logo, and [...]
Remember Who You Are
Giving advice to Apple has always been a popular pastime in the IT and business press, even though most of the advice turns out to be wrong. One suggestion that I think is horribly wrong comes from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet, who thinks Apple should start selling Macs with Windows (only) as their OS.
At first [...]
The shock of recognition: baby boomers as "seniors"
Over on Seth Godin’s blog, he mentions that he will be speaking at an upcoming conference called “Marketing to Men, Women and Boomers”. (Okay: are Boomers really a separate category from Men and Women? Come on: To the young men and womenfolk, we just look like we’re out of play.)
In any case, Seth had an internal [...]
Disrupting Markets for Fun and Profit
In a Wall Street Journal column on the US mobile phone industry, Walt Mossberg talks about the problems with the business models used by the big 4 carriers and why they’re not good for either consumers or innovation. In doing so, he touches on some ideas that have crossed my mind in the past regarding [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #3
This post is the third in a series inspired by Pragmatic Marketing’s 20 Rules of Product Management rules for technology marketing.
RULE #3 Time spend on the strategic reduces the time wasted on the tactical.
There are books written, I’m quite sure, that define strategic and tactical, but here’s my simple definition:
Strategic is where you want to go; tactical [...]
Once More, With Lawyers (or, How to Kill Citizen Marketers)
It’s nirvana for anyone who wants to build a base of passionate customer advocates.
Imagine if people were so excited about your product that they not only bought it and spent time with it and talked to their friends about it, but organized gatherings to get together and enjoy it - gatherings that then generated news [...]
