How Not To Sell Software in 2012
Alex Payne – How Not To Sell Software in 2012:
“Basically, if a given software package or service isn’t free/open, it should be as easy as humanly possible to try it, pay for it, and start using it in production. If it isn’t easy to get started with your product, I’m going to find another vendor.”
What I learned by turning off comments
Dave Winer – What I learned by turning off comments:
“I hear that some people feel there's a virtue in being silent. I don't. I see it as selfishness. You're willing to take but you're not willing to give.”
People resist stupidity, not change
Jack Vinson – People resist stupidity, not change:
“If you see people as "resisting" a change initiative, maybe they just see the immediate impact of the change as "stupid" and not helping them in their goals to learn and grow. Refactor your thinking. Get into their heads - solve problems they actually have, rather than the ones you think they have.”
"How'd it work out?"
Seth Godin – “How'd it work out?”:
“Doctors and consultants and builders are often hesitant to ask about how something worked long after the work is done. It feels like nothing but a chance to hear a complaint.
It's not. It's a chance to show that you care. And a chance to learn how to get even better at what you do.”
rNews is here. And this is what it means.
Evan Sandhaus at New York Times Open – rNews is here. And this is what it means.:
“On September 21, the IPTC and Schema.org officially announced their work together.
So by October 2011, we had a supported standard for embedding publishing specific metadata into HTML documents. Now all we had to do was actually implement rNews on nytimes.com.
And that’s what we did.
[…] all you have to do is view source on any nytimes.com article published on or after January, 23 2012. In the HTML you will see new attributes like ‘itemtype’, ‘itemprop’ and ‘itemid’. If you paste an article URL into the Google Rich Snippets tool, you can see a parse of the structured data now embedded into every nytimes.com article.”
How to Design Perfect (Software) Products
Pieter Hintjens – How to Design Perfect (Software) Products:
Trash-Oriented Design: “Eventually, something resembling a working product makes it out of the door. It's creaky and fragile, complex and ugly. The designers curse the engineers for their incompetence and pay more consultants to put lipstick onto the pig, and slowly the product starts to look a little nicer. By this time, the managers have started to try to sell the product and they find, shockingly, that no-one wants it.”
Complexity-Oriented Design: “The team, being engineers and thus loving to build stuff, build stuff. They build and build and build and end up with massive, perfectly designed complexity. The products go to market, and the market scratches its head and asks, "seriously, is this the best you can do?"”
Simplicity-Oriented Design: “We apply one measure of quality to patches, namely "can this be done any simpler while still solving the stated problem?" We can measure complexity in terms of concepts and models that the user has to learn or guess in order to use the patch. The fewer, the better. A perfect patch solves a problem with zero learning required by the user.”
