Oh, this is just too, too good.
B3TA : FEATURES : Phallic Logo Awards
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I <3 George W. Bush
And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it.
"This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all.
You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war President. No President wants to be a war President, but I am one.
You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror
I've always believed that a great product is made a few brilliant people with the vision to create something innovative & intuitive. Perhaps it's due to my designer background and philosophy, where the success and the failure of a design firm really rests on the vision of a few people, rather than say, a focus group, research institute or a database collected over a number of years.
Apparently, that isn't the corporate culture we have in America today. The corporate culture we have today is a series of handed-me-down responsibilities. The board of directors demands that the CEO to be responsible for the direction of the company. The CEO demands that his VP's of various operational group within the company be responsible for the direction of the products. So you would think that somewhere down the line of responsibilities, someone has to make choices & decisions.
Problem is, responsibilities is also directly linked with faults and blame. It wasn't the CEO that made the decision to focus on project A instead of B, it was the VP of some other department. It wasn't the VP that made the decision either, it was the people working in the department that gave the VP the valid information, whatever that may be, that led to the decision for the VP to make the recommendation to focus on project A instead of B. Thus causing company to lose market share and money instead of potentially make millions and watch the stock prices go up (which is only a hypothesis, since project B never got off the groundf anyway).
So to preserve one's "lack of blame", one must create at least another level in the chain of responsibilities. Thus, at least this is what I theorized, focus groups & market research were born.
I'm not completely against market research or focus groups, but I *am* against using those as the only benchmark of a company's ability to make the right decisions. Companies hire people with dozens of years of experience in a given field, trusting that their expertise will provide the company with the right process, visions and plans. Yet at the end of the day, the same said company will question their employees to come up with data & research that supports their every decision.
So what if Jack in Sales Operations has 15 years of experience, and knows that the marketing angle we're taking simply won't work? He's only been in the field for 15 years, what does he know? Let's go out and do a round of focus group, market research, surveys, then we'll see if the evidence is substantial enough to prove Jack right or wrong. God forbid if there was inconclusive evidence, in which case we'll just do another round of research and focus groups until we get enough evidence to be conclusive.
At the end of the day, if we don't give at least some credence to the 15 years of experience that Jack had, why did we hire Jack anyway? Why didn't we just hire some fresh-out-of-college data research geek? Google it, wiki it, then focus group, survey; all decisions in consumer product should be made that way, shouldn't it?
I am Jack's rambling rage.
...That's often the mantra of many consumer product companies. It's not just about finding an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, but creating a new need in the market. As devious as it sounds, the reality is that if you break down "need" to its most simplistic form, our lives would only be able survival on the bare minimum of food and water. For example, television was a "created need", and for the most part, is it now an ingrained part of our daily lives.
However, for every created need, there are a dozen of "WTF were you thinking?" I think this qualifies as one of them:
iCarta: Stereo Dock for iPod® with Bath Tissue Holder
I realize the product is a bit on the old side. I ran across a picture while browsing TUAW, and couldn't resist posting it here. Since the product has been released for almost a year now, I'd like to see how many of these they've actually sold.
There are plenty of things going on that I *can* post about, but didn't have a chance to. So at some point.. they will be posted, right? Right?....
You know it's only a matter of time... just another proof any sort of piracy protection ultimately, will fail.
Brute force keygen cracks open Vista
It's certainly not an easy hack, but at the end of the day is that it *will* work. Microsoft will probably also attempt to figure which keys are hacked and which ones aren't, and disable those which are. The problem is, if hacked keys become widespread and varied enough, it will become harder and harder to track & keep everything "clean". If two people calls up the Windows Activation hotline, who do you trust?
